Narrative Ethics

Narrative Ethics

Thomas J. Wilson Prize The Board of Syndics of Harvard University Press has awarded this book the twenty-fourth annual Thomas J. Wilson Prize, honoring the late director of the Press. The Prize is awarded to the book chosen by the Syndics as the best first book accepted by the Press during the calendar year.

Narrative Ethics Adam Zachary Newton

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRES S

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

Copyright © 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Second printing, 1997 First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 1997 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative ethics / Adam Zachary Newton. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-60087-8 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-60088-6 (pbk.) 1. Ethics in literature. 2. Fiction-Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Philosophy, Modern-20th century. 4. Ethics, Modern-20th century. 5. Narration (Rhetoric). 6. American fiction-History and criticism-Theory, etc. 7. English literature-History and criticism-Theory, etc. PN49.N52 1995 809,3'9353-dc20 94-19710

To my mother and my father

.'~N' '''=N' N,:r ,,-,= ~,-rp., :c-rN:: t:r

:N,:r

t"!J:n,~ :r~~~

1'''= ~'''p:r -''CN -- ''CN nN' '''=N nN .,=~~ C"'N~ t'Qt::: ."~''''=~' =:r"~"=

"n.,., ;'~"N~ =:r"~1' "~N "~~'C

Kiddushin 30b C"~:r

Genesis 26:18

:n-'N= nN -'51M'" i=M~" =~'" .''':N C"":N "'C"= "~N

'''!J"

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

1. Narrative as Ethics 2. Toward a Narrative Ethics

IX Xlll

1 35

3. We Die in a Last Word: Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

71

4. Lessons of (for) the Master: Short Fiction by Henry James

125

5. Creating the Uncreated Features of His Face: Monstration in Crane, Melville, and Wright

175

6. Telling Others: Secrecy and Recognition in Dickens,

Barnes, and Ishiguro

241

Conclusion

287

Notes

295

Index

331

Acknowledgments

A parable about parables is associated with the Dubner Maggid, the most masterly folk preacher in eighteenth-century Poland. His great admirer the Vilna Gaon, the supreme Torah authority of his time and an ethicist rather than a storyteller, once asked the Maggid about his uncanny talent for crafting meshalim (parables) to gloss any scriptural verse. The Maggid explained that his system was identical to that used by a village marksman who, when asked to explain his own proficiency, pointed to the bull's-eye and said, "I merely shoot at the wall, and then outline the hole with circles." It is an ideal image for the coefficient relation between narrative fiction and ethics which I explore in the following pages-the ripple effect of story, its necessary entailments and consequences-except that prose fiction, unlike the meshal, remains an open and unfinalized form, and ethics, in the sense I employ it, does not neatly reduce to a simple matter of apologue or moral example. And if a more modern parable about parables is to be believed, even the simplest narratives can bind just as easily as they can loose; thus, as Kafka wrote, one may "win in reality" while already having "lost in parable." Still, the Maggid's very name ("teller") betrays a linguistic connection between the Hebrew words for narrative and declaration, a performative dynamic which lies at the heart of narrative ethics as both theory and practice-hence, I must admit, the gravitational force for me in an image of story banded by ever-widening ethical circles. Nevertheless, as befits that part of a book devoted to registering one's debts and one's thanks, and whose very burden-acknowledgment-names a concept which plays an integral role in the analyses to follow, I would like to apply the Maggid's parable in a different way. Thus if I have hit my mark in these pages, it is due as much to points

x

Acknowledgments

already marked for me which I have merely encircled as to any I may have selected myself. For their guidance-sometimes a matter of intent, sometimes not-I acknowledge first my parents, to whom and before whom I say hineni-here am I. Most of the wells I have dug in my life my brother Scott has dug before me, or led me to; fraternal Abraham to my Isaac, fellow Ishmael (or Bulkington) with back to leeward land, he is perhaps this book's most understanding reader. I thank also my brother Fredric for his generosity and for his pivotal suggestion that I be a teacher, and Laura Newton for early modeling in the discipline. As always, the steadfastness and loyalty of Buster Newton were a tonic. I am grateful for grants from Harvard University that enabled me to begin this project, and for support from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation that allowed me to finish it. At every stage, Jo Keroes has exemplified Roland Barthes's observation that friendship essentially works out to be a matter of acoustics: the greater the sonority, the better the friend. Shlornith Rimmon-Kenan has my deep gratitude for her solicitude and advice, both free-flowing in Cambridge as well as in Jerusalem. I thank Philip Fisher, Martha Nussbaum, and Werner Sollors for their willingness to read these chapters as they were taking shape on one coast, and Rosemary Patton and Bill Robinson for getting me started while I resided on the other. I am grateful to Stanley Cavell for giving the finished manuscript his blessing. A special thanks to Irene Kacandes and Paul Panadero, wonderful colleagues both, for their kindness, availability, and shared interest in this work. Richard Cohen, Robert Gibbs, Sandor Goodhart, and Stephane Moses all helped me in the always-to-be-accomplished task which is reading Emmanuel Levinas. My editors at Harvard University Press, Lindsay Waters, Alison Kent, and-invaluably-Naney Clemente, facilitated the almost-as-elusive task of bringing this work from manuscript to print. Rabbis Harry Sinoff and Ben-Zion Gold gave that task the shape of redemptive conversation when I found myself, while revising, in need of Wedding Guests. In that same capacity as Ancient Mariner, finally, I acknowledge the interlocutors of my life-above all, Doris Sommer-for life lessons in narrative ethics. In one's own story, too, may lie a "not yet" (as Emmanuel Levinas has put it) "more distant than any future." For lifestories, mariners know, are where we build a ship and a harbor at the same time, and complete the harbor long after the ship has gone down.

Acknowledgments

xi

How, then, to keep/stop narrating? There is no more exigent a feat, except perhaps the striking home, which (in the spirit of Mikhail Bakhtin) is the art of answerability. Mention of Bakhtin and Levinas returns me full circle to the Maggid's parable, and to its obligingly generative metaphor. Although one strives in a work like this for marksmanship that is as personalized as it is precise--one prefers, that is, to call one's own shots-a set of mimetic circles orbiting a centripetal hub quite aptly describes my methodology in this book. The textual analyses which compose Chapters 3-6 can be seen as pivoting out from and around a common core, itself coaxial: the allied intersubjective projects of Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stanley Cavell. Any philosophical claims I put forward in this book, therefore, are meant less than programmatically; here too, my deployment of bull's-eyes should be construed Maggidlike, in the spirit of thematic extension-of throwing (to adapt Cavell's formulation) philosophy's voice.

Abbreviations

Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vladimir Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990) AN Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: Scribner's, 1934) BI Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) CWK Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) DI Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) ED Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) ER J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) HH J. Hillis Miller, Hawthorne and History: Defacing It (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) LK Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) MWM Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book ofEssays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) NDR Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited: An Essay in Method, trans. J. E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) OTB Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or beyond Essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981) RB Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, ed. Gary S. Morton and Caryl Emerson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989) KT Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) SS Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power ofFiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) TI Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969)

AA

Narrative Ethics

1 Narrative as Ethics "Say quick," quoth he, "I bid thee sayWhat manner of man art thou?" Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched With a woeful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale; And then it left me free. Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, The heart within me burns. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

And as he spoke, 1 was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into. Philip Roth, The Counterlife

Opening Story narrative begins, once again. But it is doubtful that a story as such is even expected. "What's bidden is merely a short answer-"Say quick"-a point of information-""What manner of man art thou?" And yet, what the Wedding Guest elicits far, far exceeds what he could have predicted, or even wanted. Instead of an answer, he gets a narrative; instead of plain fact, he's given, or rather subjected to, gesture, performance, relation, whose energy and effect quite overflow the interrogative cupped hand held out for response's small coin. Like Descartes's "idea of Infinity" the story surpasses the thought measured to think it. Perhaps it's the fault of the imperative. The Wedding Guest bids, "say!" And the Mariner willingly complies; he does so not by stating a proposition, a "Said," but rather by staging a performance, a "Saying," a proposing and exposing of the self. He does not answer; he "stories"-not a noun but a verb both transitive and reflexive, since the Mariner's is not the only life here (to echo Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman in The Counterlife) that could be said to have turned into story. Odd as the conjunction of my two epigraphs may at first seem, they are indeed meant as a pair. And even if pairing them this way does set the stage for more perhaps unlikely combinations of texts in the chapters to follow, that is not my primary aim. Rather, glossing Coleridge with Philip Roth allows me to call attention to a common, though sometimes overlooked, fact about narrative: that the story it frequently tells is a story of storytelling. Narrative, as participatory act, is part "Said" (to refer again to terms employed by Emmanuel Levinas) and part "Saying," the latter-the level of intersubjective relation-being the site of surplus, of the unforeseen, of self-exposure. And while it is true that each level has its own way of

T H E ANCIENT MARINER'S

3

4

Narrative as Ethics

turning life into story, and story into life, "Saying," as Coleridge's poem so memorably illustrates, tends to exact the profounder price of such communicative alchemy-from speaker, from hearer, and from text. What "kind" of life, what "kind" of story, then, do we find in Coleridge's poem? And what price(s) paid? (The answer to the latter, more pressing question, follows naturally from the first.) Both life and story, we discover, are much like the "rime" of the poem's title: hostages to reiteration, the eternal return of chill, thaw, and chill again. Not the poem as touchstone, but rather the tale it tells as hoarstonethe rime of repetitive rhyming, the self-referencing of narrative frost. Additionally, both life and story (or rather their union as "life-intostory") suggest a performative analogue to the character the poem calls "Life-in-Death," the entity who "thicks man's blood with cold." Mariner, tale, and, finally, listener all remain suspended-animated but numbed-in the grip of narrative compulsion. It is the paradox of seizure as paralysis. Is this immobilization, this Medusa effect, the sort of thing, then, I have in mind when I say that narrative exacts a "price"? It is, and more. Which is to say that beyond the moral thematics of Coleridge's poem is a realm of ethical confrontation. The price, in other words, is higher even than the skeptical dead end that the Mariner discovers in his striving after authenticity, the kind of blockage which Stanley Cavell locates as the poem's moral in a brilliant essay on Romantic poetry. That essay tracks the Mariner's journey as an allegory of skepticism, interpreting the Mariner's crossing of the "Line" (identified by Coleridge's gloss as the Equator) as an attempt to pierce the Kantian screen separating noumena from phenomena. 1 Like some intrepid phenomenologist, the Mariner sets sail in order to recover "the things themselves," while at the same time seeking to reach uncharted linguistic shores, leaving behind his expressive connection with others (his "attunement") precisely so that he may rediscover and thus revivify it. Skepticism, in the form of the Mariner's travails of language and sojourn, is the price one pays for wishing to be on intimate and authentic terms with human discourse. Hence the Mariner's predicament and the price of his telling passion: striving for immediacy puts him on a course full of skeptical detours. To appreciate what is found, as well as what is lost, along these detours, to acknowledge, in words borrowed from Emmanuel Levinas, a price

Narrative as Ethics

5

exacted "otherwise and beyond" skepticism, I should make clear that my reading will have to exceed or veer away from the philosophical logic that drives Cavell's interpretation and leads him to "the Mariner's" moral. By following the premises and strictures laid out by the text, Cavell reads the poem as philosophy. And this critical speculativeness does indeed nicely parallel the poem's own speculations, in the form of the seriousness, the "religiosity," of the skeptical attitude as personified by the Mariner. 2 Thus, Cavell will speak of needing to "imitate" the Mariner in the form of "responding to" and "answering for" a certain claim enjoined by the text, drawing from it, in a word, its moral. And yet while the talk of morality here accords with Cavell's own subtle inquiry into the claims of intersubjectivity against the claims of reason (the very tension between knowing and acknowledging which will surface again and again in this book), its thematic orientation to the price paid for "overcoming" language does not explicitly engage the sense of ethics I'm after here. 3 A fuller price is reckoned by the text. And it requires that we leave the dimension of the poem's "Said" for its "Saying." A finer attunement to the Mariner means that to "imitate" or "respond to" the Mariner even further, goes beyond and across the traditional hierarchical "line" which divides form from content, or "Saying" from "Said," and makes the one subserve the other. Let us, then, pursue the Mariner otherwise and beyond (Levinas' vocabulary again) the "Line" which "drawing a moral" marks out. One way to do that (as the Mariner perhaps anticipates) is to disrupt the conventionally understood synonymy of the words moral and ethical. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner already enacts that disruption itself in the distinction it makes between moral propositionality, or the realm of the "Said," and ethical performance, the domain of "Saying." Thus, as exemplum, the poem does indeed invite readers to "draw a moral," a paraphrase of the poem's own prescriptive intent. "He prayeth best who loveth best all creatures great and small" expresses the Mariner's atonement for an unwarranted violation; that atonement generates attunement all around, as readers then apply the "moral" in whichever way most persuades them. "Drawing" a moral, like "applying" it, is thus a conscious and external act of imitatio. But as story the poem opens out onto a quite different realm: that territory inside the poem shared by Mariner and Wedding Guest in

6

Narrative as Ethics

their communicative, interlocutionary relation-in their immediate claim on each other-and that territory outside the text marked out by the claims it makes upon readers (though, as I will make clear, the question of textual "inside" versus "outside" is neither simple nor selfevident). It is in this domain or at this level that we can more fully address what I mean by a price of "saying" in text or story. "Saying" in Coleridge's poem is unmistakably contaminating. Any doubt we may have had about the potency and exigency of the Mariner's speech fades in the face of the paralytic effect it has on his listeners. "If someone talks without stopping," writes Maurice Blanchot, "he is locked up in the end," which implies for me more than simply literal incarceration. 4 Being locked up by voice, for instance, by the headlong rush of story, is a fate which the Mariner must suffer, but always in company with an unwitting listener. I have already suggested that the mechanical repetition of his tale, despite the urgency it produces, keeps the Mariner in an expressively de-animated state. As he "stops," that is, narratively suspends, Wedding Guest, Hermit, and each interlocutor in tum-"Now wherefore stoppest thou nle?"-he transmits to them some measure of his own predicament. What produces merely a temporary release from living his story-retelling it-not only returns him to death-in-life, but similarly sentences every person whose ear (and destiny) he bends. As he is gripped by compulsive storytelling, so he grips and compels others in tum: he "bends them to his will"; they "cannot but obey." As a communicative act, then, the Mariner's narrating could be said ultimately to repudiate more than revivify. And as Cavell has pointed out, if the Mariner initiates conversation with others, he does so merely to use them to catalyze his own storytelling, to force him to his tale, while forcing them to listen. Thus like all good father-confessors, the Hermit in effect functions to beget or engender narrative; likewise the Wedding Guest first stimulates, then incubates the story, to be left more affected than instructed, contaminated rather than genuinely transfigured. But such seemingly fecund effects belie the stillborn aspect of language in the poem. As in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, storytelling culminates here in polar desolation; or, to cite another sibling text of Romanticism, E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman," the distinctively uncanny property of language in Coleridge's poem is penetration, its capacity to leave a lasting and irrational mark or impression.

Narrative as Ethics

7

Among the various allegorical personae traditionally imputed to the Mariner-mystic catalyst, redemptive scapegoat, teacher, sage, apostle, or, as in Cavell's reading, skeptic-the one which undergirds and enables all other possibilities is, simply, that of narrator. All allegorical translations of the poem's meaning to an order external to it-allegories of salvation, of skepticism, of the Fall, of Romanticism-rest upon on a more basic allegory internal to the text: narrative structure and form as ethical relation. Independent of any external moral brought to bear upon it (or of those it may aphorize for itself), Coleridge's poem is built around an armature of intersubjective relation accomplished through story. That armature is what I will call ethics: narrative as relationship and human connectivity, as Saying over and above Said, or as Said called to account in Saying; narrative as claim, as risk, as responsibility, as gift, as price. Above all, as an ethics, narrative is performance or act-purgative, as in Turgenev's "The Country Doctor," malignant, as in Camus's La chute, historically recuperative, as in A. B. Yehoshua's Mr. Mani, erotic and redemptive as in The Thousand and One Nights, obsessive and coercive, as in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. To juxtapose just the last two: In the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, narrative, through coercion, ultimately enables marriage; in Coleridge's poem, a similar process disables it. In one, the procreative capacity of narrative serves to model relations of friendship and conjugal love-teller, listener, and witness become bound to one another through the liberating force of story; in the other, storytelling fastens on to its participants only to sever them from the world--driven out or emptied out, they remain forlornly yoked to one another only through involuntary and baleful narrative enchainment. Both these as well as the other permutations I list above represent certain models of narrative as an ethics, paradigms which in turn imply fundamental ethical questions about what it means to generate and transmit narratives, and to implicate, transform, or force the persons who participate in them. I have already gestured toward such ethical questions through the link between the Ancient Mariner's inauguration of his "ghastly tale" and Nathan Zuckerman's lucubrations on it as the reciprocal transformation of life and story. The Mariner supplies but the first of three textual instances I will adduce in this introduction. Together, they prepare the way for the more extensive readings which make up the rest of this book, each of

8

Narrative as Ethics

which to one degree or another touches on aspects of both narration and representation, vicissitudes of the narrative act, on the one hand, and of the fictionalization of person into literary character, on the other. But Roth and Zuckerman, whether they would own up to it or not, stake a profounder claim: they announce both a theory and a moral inquiry (into a reciprocity between life and fiction), and in so doing articulate the thrust and scope of what I have named narrative ethics.

The Sense of Narrative Ethics Why this phrase? Each of the two elements of "narrative ethics" calls up a welter of implications. And their linkage within a single phrase might therefore threaten to swell a register already inundated with like constructions-"rhetorical hermeneutics," "masculinist semiotics," "tropological politics," and so on. But this book's title is intended to connote a logic which binds its two parts intrinsically and necessarily. The fact that narrative ethics can be construed in two directions at once-on the one hand, as attributing to narrative discourse some kind of ethical status, and on the other, as referring to the way ethical discourse often depends on narrative structures-makes this reciprocity between narrative and ethics appear even more essential, more grammatical, so to speak, and less the accident of coinage. In this book I will argue for such a relation as a defining property of prose fiction, of particular import in nineteenth- and later twentiethcentury texts. The cultural and periodic delimitations I have chosen reflect developments within specific and complex literary histories; but an implicitly general claim remains for other traditions of fiction, as well as certain kinds of narrative poetry.5 The simpler term in my title to explain is "narrative," a term obviously familiar to literary criticism and usefully formulated in Gerard Genette's triadic model: (1) the story, or signified content, (2) the narrative, the signifier or narrative text, and (3) narrating, the narrative act. It is primarily this third element, what I have previously identified as the level of "Saying," that I discuss in the following chapters, building upon it my own three-part structure of narrational, representational, and hermeneutic levels. Genette awards narrating logical pride of place in fictional discourse, explaining that "the true order is ... something like narrating/story/narrative, with the narrative act initiating (inventing) both the story and its narrative, which are then

Narrative as Ethics

9

completely indissociable."6 But since I believe that this act initiates responsibilities alongside forms, it receives far greater attention here than Genette or other narratologists have allowed. 7 To define the particular sense in which I employ the concept of "ethics," however, I will begin by saying what it does not mean, by turning to the practical, problem-solving role it has usually been forced to assume in literary criticism. 8 Traditionally, that role has been central. To take the obvious example, as exemplum again, ethics closely informed the novel's early development as a discourse both accessory (SamueIJohnson) and internal (Richardson, Fielding) to narrative texts. Novels trained ethical sensibility. On the one hand, in texts like Tom Jones, and later and with greater sophistication, Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch, narrators schooled their readership in the correct evaluation of and response to character and moral situation. This tradition culminated, with Henry James's novels and critical prefaces, in an inquiry into moral language and the way words shape and deform social relations. More overtly sentimental fiction like Pamela, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Dombey and Son, on the other hand, instructed response by inducing identificatory states of compassion and pity; a novelistic practice that anticipates the Geneva School's reader-response theory of borrowed consciousness, such texts predicated their moral effects on a Humean or Rousseauistic model of sympathy as contamination, prose fiction being the occasion for lending out states of experience. In both cases, however, ethics operates in interpolated fashion, bolstering the authoritarian character of the novel with deontic and legislative weight. It exercised this influence both autonomously and hand in hand with epistemological, sociological, and political frameworks which the novel inculcated from its outset. 9 From this perspective, one speaks of ethics as a "defining property of the novel" in terms of "authorial responsibility," or of literary characters' "moral imagination," or of the "exemplariness" of theme and topic; narrative form functions as a vehicle for substantive ethical "content." Into this closed system of moral exemplification enters the selfadequating ethos of the critic, who, with Arnoldian flair and Aristotelian probity, matches form to content, and content to conduct. Ethical criticism, in this wise, unproblematically translates literary discourse into moral recourse. IO Despite the formal innovations of literary modernism, "ethics" (with

10

Narrative as Ethics

some qualifications) until very recently signified just this kind of approach to textual interpretation, its relevance for narrative theory undermined only by the advent of formalist and poststructuralist approaches and their sustained repudiation of normative, extra-linguistic categories. (The cottage industry which has formed around moral philosophy's interest in a text such as James's The Golden Bowl illustrates this-sophisticated though still parasitical-relation between ethics and literary analysis.) In 1957 Northrop Frye correlated ethics and criticism under the aegis of liberal humanism as "not a rhetorical comparison of social facts to predetermined values, but . . . the consciousness of the presence of society."11 A position attacked for its outmoded liberal humanism by theorists as different as Frank Lentricchia, Hans Robert Jauss, and Tzvetan Todorov, Frye's stance makes ethics essentially synonymous with critical pluralism. 12 Perhaps not incidentally, the working definitions of ethics in two recent books, J. Hillis Miller's The Ethics of Reading and Wayne Booth's The Company We Keep: An Ethics ofFiction, despite enormous differences from Frye's, suggest at least a family resemblance to it. In their parallel determinations to "submit" to the effects of fiction Miller and Booth both espouse what they might want to call a narrative ethics. Their purposes are nevertheless very different from each other's and from my own. While Miller subscribes to an ethic of unreadability, a linguistic imperative from which readers cannot exempt themselves, and Booth constructs a theory of textual ethos in terms of ratios of friendship, each operates essentially within a formalist and Kantian framework. Literary texts demand judgment from their interpreters; so all that remains at issue is to distinguish kinds of ethical criticism from one another according to the degree to which such judgment rests upon criteria either bound or free. (Ethics as freedom, ethics as duty: the ambiguity attaching to the word was never so clear.) Hence the curious fact that while Booth and Miller stand poles apart in critical approach, they can be legitimately described as two kinds of ethical critics, principally invested, like Frye, in the distinctive quality of ethical/critical judgment, of its rightness as textual commentary. Accordingly, each prises apart the more conjunctive dynamic between narrative and ethics I wish to pursue here. "The ethics of reading"/"the ethics of fiction"/"the ethics of criticism": all such formulations sit precariously on an ambiguous genitive. By purposeful contrast, my

Narrative as Ethics

11

proposal of a narrative ethics implies simply narrative as ethics: the ethical consequences of narrating story and fictionalizing person, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in that process. To cite the case of Coleridge again, the difference lies between readings which allegorize the poem's events to a second-order story of translated meaning and those I will develop in ensuing chapters which attend exclusively to the shape, the drama, and the circumstances of the poem's own story, its strictly narrative details, since that story already reads, or allegorizes, itself. It is the difference, to put it another way, between a deontology and a phenomenology-between a reading which attempts to evaluate or even solve a text's problems and one which engages them in their concrete, formal, narrative particularity. One faces a text as one might face a person, having to confront the claims raised by that very immediacy, an immediacy of contact, not of meaning. (Like the sense of "claim" intended by Cavell's The Claim of Reason, my use of the word here yokes together "a claim staked" by fiction for its own seriousness and "a claim exerted" by it, as with Mariner and Wedding Guest, on readers and critics.) And in the field of intersubjectivity demarcated by such claims one can discern the more authentic provenance for "ethics" as I understand the term. Jiirgen Habermas has called intersubjectivity the road not taken by the "discourse of modernity," that line of thought which stretches from Hegel through poststructuralism. In analytic philosophy, the intersubjective became either a strictly epistemological question (the problem of "other minds") or a casualty of the fact/value split (meta-ethics versus ethical praxis). And while it did become an explicit topic for phenomenology, continental philosophers also tended to ramify it in the customary terms of subject/object relations. Ironically, this anemic sort of life granted to the ethical in philosophical discourse merely parallels the phenomenological thinness it has had to endure in literary criticism. The concept and term have taken root nevertheless. Thus while intersubjectivity (or "the question of the Other") has quite rapidly become the focus of post-Heideggerean social ontology, hermeneutics, and communicative ethics (as well as of a rejuvenated moral philosophy in Britain and the United States), so "alterity" as the common issue in difference criticisms (gender, cultural, and post-Marxist) has come to saturate the discourse of contemporary literary and cultural theory.13

12

Narrative as Ethics

Literature and philosophy now often intersect along just these lines, most accessibly, for instance, in the case of Mikhail Bakhtin's "dialogism." "Ethics," in this alternative sense, signifies recursive, contingent, and interactive dramas of encounter and recognition, the sort which prose fiction both crystallizes and recirculates in acts of interpretive engagement. Traditionally, when philosophers proceed from ontology to ethics, they replace a model of theoretical necessity with a model of human freedom. But as Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin have argued (two thinkers whose work I braid together with Stanley Cavell's in the pages to follow), moral philosophy remains under the shadow of the totalizing pretensions of ontology as prima philosophia, even and especially when it concerns itself with questions of freedolll. Ethical theorists have traditionally defined freely determined action according to a law of rationality from. which they can derive criteria for moral behavior at once universalizable and intrinsically intelligible. Ethos, in effect, borrows from logos a normative account of human action which subsumes particular and contingent facts under a general and totalizing order. In Aristotle, Kant, Hume, and more recently Habermas, ethics is expressed in terms of obligation and autonomy, both attributes determined by referel1ce to universal and self-evidel1t laws of reason. By contrast, in the special, but by no means unusual, sense I intend it and provisionally describe above, "ethics" refers to the radicality and uniqueness of the moral situation itself, a binding claim exercised upon the self by a concrete and singular other whose moral appeal precedes both decision al1d understanding. As Fabio Ciaramelli puts it, the ethical subject is "assigned to morality by the appeal of the other.,,14 Reversing the conventional logic of moral philosophers (indeed repudiating it as logic), Levinas, for instance,· argues that consciousness and even subjectivity follow from, are legitimated by, the ethical summons which proceeds from intersubjective encounter. Subjectivity arrives, so to speak, in the form of a responsibility toward an Other which no one else can undertake; if, from this perspective, selfhood always remains in some way incomplete, it is because ethical responsibility continually outstrips one's capacity to assume it. For Levinas, "ethics" describes neither ontic nor deontic categories, which generalize theories of reality from subjective experience; ethics, rather, originates from

Narrative as Ethics

13

the opposite direction-from the other to me, in the sensible experience of the face which he or she presents to me. "The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility. As such, the face of the other is verticality and uprightness; it spells a relation of rectitude. The face is not in front of me but above me ... In the relation to the face I am exposed as a usurper of the place of the other.,,15 One of my claims here is that certain kinds of textuality parallel this description of ethical encounter in several obvious ways. Cutting athwart the mediatory role of reason, narrative situations create an immediacy and force, framing relations of provocation, call, and response that bind narrator and listener, author and character, or reader and text. Again, these relations will often precede decision and understanding, with consciousness arriving late, after the assumption or imposition of intersubjective ties. In this sense, prose fiction translates the interactive problematic of ethics into literary forms. Stories, like persons, originate alogically. As ethical performance, in Levinas' sense, they are concussive: they shock and linger as "traumatisms of astonishment." The "logic" which binds narrative and ethics, then, is really a pragmatics, implying an interactive rather than a legislative order,16 a diachrony across the temporal world of the text and the real time of reading. Since the vicissitudes of narrative situations do not easily submit to prescriptive or procedural norms of rationality (they take place as the stories which produce them unfold), "ethics" in this book will therefore not signify a set of meta-theoretical ideas or preexisting moral norms. 17 Instead, it will mean, as Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, "the historical concreteness of the individual fact, and not the theoretical truth of a proposition," a moral discourse which derives from a more primordial "groundwork." As a problematic, then, it finds for me its most satisfying correlations in the respective philosophical projects of Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stanley Cavell. And since my methodology focuses upon prose fiction, I turn now to the second of three textual instances I invoke in this chapter. A short story by Sherwood Anderson will let me flesh out some of the ideas introduced through Coleridge's poem in order to introduce a vocabulary and set of concepts. In this short reading and the one I call "true story," which comes

14

Narrative as Ethics

later in the chapter, one can trace the common thread of blurred boundaries between reading people and reading plots, between the separate domains of life and story.

Pure Story Like The Rime ofthe Ancient Mariner, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio stands as representative of a certain cultural moment in literary history.l8 Its topic, form, and closeness to Anderson's own personal circumstances together herald a shift toward American modernism, toward an aesthetic of the fragment, toward a kind of anti-Romantic Romanticism. But, as I have also maintained about Coleridge's poem, one can also see the stories which make up Anderson's novel as telling an internal story: of storytelling and of narrative form. As case studies, they form a kind of Krafft-Ebing of narrative dynamics; a repetitive lesson in the price exacted by storytelling, they demonstrate what one might call an American Chamber of Narrative Horrors. 19 The brevity of these stories merely calls attention to, or grotesquely highlights, the stripped-down dialogics of narrative exposure. The novel collects these stories under the rubric "The Tales and the Persons." Almost all feature an isolated protagonist forced up against a rather blank interlocutor; tale and person metonymize each other in a way we recognize from Coleridge, as lives turn into stories and stories fold back again into lives. Anderson calls his narrators "grotesques" not merely because of their disfigured sociality, but because, like the Mariner's, their lives collapse to those rare moments in which they can narrate the story of a collapsed life. "Loneliness," one of these, is described by the governing narrator as "the story of a room almost more than it is the story of a man.,,20 This formulation is important, since it effectively reduces person not just to the confines of a tale, but, more, to the narrative space within. The story, we discover-and I mean that in the two senses of "finding out" and "exposing"-reflexively examines the dynamics of authorship, in particular autobiographical narration. It lays bare the grotesque implications of a life and self transformed into narrative fiction in such a way that being recognized or understood become tantamount to being deciphered or read. Perhaps most important, the

Narrative as Ethics

15

story uniquely dramatizes the risk, both discursive and existential, of telling one's "life-story." Not coincidentally, all these matters describe the motivations of the storyteller, Enoch Robinson, for they embody the very things he implicitly wishes his audience, George Willard, to comprehend. "'You'll understand if you try hard enough,' he said conclusively. 'I have looked at you when you went past me on the street and I think you understand. It isn't hard. All you have to do is believe what I say, just listen and believe, that's all there is to it''' (175). But eliciting comprehension here means forcing it-the paradox of narrative "seizure." Now an old man, Enoch (the Hebrew meaning of hanoch, "teacher," being quite apposite here) introduces a highly charged narrative formula in his instructions, since for the first time in the sequence of Winesburg's stories, the listener is drawn to minister to the storyteller (rather than the other way around) by the laying on of hands: "He wanted to put his arms around the litde old man. In the half darlmess the man talked and the boy listened, filled with sadness" (175). Before this moment, though, George-a faded figure for the reader-acts "the young reporter." Enoch represents for him merely another curiosity, another expose, one more of Winesburg's grotesques. Until this point a narrator outside the story's diegesis has disclosed the salient features of Enoch's tale, in particular the fact that as a young man he had escaped the confines of Winesburg and moved to New York. Although ostensibly freed from Winesburg's weird narrative bale, and despite the advent of artistic friendships, marriage, and fatherhood, Enoch nevertheless gives himself over to the imaginative production of character, to "making up people."21 "He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy.... He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New York" (178). Merely to come from Winesburg, it seems, provides sufficient cause to disfigure one's personhood, and twist lived experience to the dimensions of literary figuration. Ultimately, Enoch leaves wife and children and sequesters himself in the room which he peoples with his fictions (as did Anderson himself, famously forsaking his own domestic circumstances in Elyria, Ohio, for

16

Narrative as Ethics

the freedom of Cleveland). And it is in this collapsed space that, as a kind of allegory of autobiography, the story models its own internal narrative conditions. 22 At a crucial moment in the story, the narrator allows Enoch to take over the narration of his own story, a meaningful transition since it sets in motion a series of metonymic transfers of authorial responsibility. The story now reduces to one particular and summary incident, what Enoch gnomically refers to as "the thing that happened." Enoch proceeds to speak of his room, his "people," a woman next door to whom he unwisely confessed one night, his ambivalence about being understood, and of the incompatibility of all these things. For unlike Coleridge's Mariner, Enoch finds risk, not intermittent (and illusory) release, in narrative unburdening. The risk in telling his story means that he will find himself caught in language, a phrase which cuts two ways: either he will make himself understood, and thus be "caught," or he will speak and not be understood, thus "catching himself up." How does one, the story asks, tell oneself without losing oneself: as though the tellability of one's story were a finite, measurable thing, a volume capable of being diminished, like air in a room. As Edmond Jabes writes, "To tell a story, in my opinion, is to lose it. If I tell you about my life in detail, it escapes in the details I have chosen to recount.,,23 In his essay on Henry James, Joseph Conrad notes, "I doubt the heroism of my readers," suggesting that they might not be equal to the interpretive tasks he poses for them. For Enoch it could well be said that he "fears the hearing of his hearers," since for him storytelling depends on the acoustic space in which it occurs, its success being a function of the listeners' capacity for sonority, for resonance; in not keeping his words to himself (as the common expression says of hands), Enoch fears he will lose them in the dead air of deficient response. When, in a scene uncannily reminiscent of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (another text about the hazards of self-fictionalizing and narrative exigency), the lure of narrative having become too irresistible a force, Enoch speaks; not surprisingly, things go "to smash": I became mad to make her understand me and to know what a big thing I was in that room. I wanted her to see how important I was. I told her over and over. When she tried to go away, I ran and locked the door. I followed her about. I talked and talked and then all of a sudden things went to smash. A look came into her eyes and I knew

Narrative as Ethics

17

she did understand. Maybe she had understood all the time. I was furious. I couldn't stand it. I wanted her to understand but, don't you see, I couldn't let her understand. I felt that then she would know everything, that I would be submerged, drowned out, you see. That's how it is. I don't know why. (177) It is at precisely this point in the story that the frame breaks, and Enoch performs outside the story exactly what he relates had occurred inside it, the same ambivalence, the same retraction, the identical conflict. That is, the narrative pressure which he describes as having driven away the woman in his story-a matter of description-repeats itself, is enacted, in his effect on George, whom he drives away. The story is, to paraphrase Stanley Fish, a self-contaminating artifact. George (Wedding Guest now turned Mariner) forces the storyteller, coaxing and browbeating him for the "story," and ultimately confirming Enoch's fears by failing to grasp what's happening. The story counts on its readers, however, for more sophistication. The phrase "the story of a room" really means the narrative contours of the story Enoch needs to tell at every point. The "room" is the story he tells the woman next door, as it is also the story that he tells George, as it is the story he tells us. And in each successive frame but one, the same volume diminishes, the same life goes out of the room. The one frame provisionally exempted remains the one that governs the reader's interpretive response. Thus the narrative logic here requires that after Enoch finishes the story and explains that "she took all my people away. They went out through the door after her," George must respond similarly. He "gets" the story-but only as a reporter would, not a genuine interlocutor. What remains, once the life has gone out of the room, finally disclosed and stripped of all fictional appurtenances, is all there ever was: narrative voice marooned in narrative space. Its readers now remain its only hearers; and it is their acoustical sensitivity which stands at issue.

Ethical Self-Situating The story is its own lesson. As an allegory of narration which follows from the internal framework of the text, it compactly outlines the triadic structure of narrative ethics which I merely hinted at in my reading of Coleridge and which I can spelV out now. The triad comprises: (1) a narrational ethics (in this case, signifying the exigent con-

18

Narrative as Ethics

ditions and consequences of the narrative act itself); (2) a representational ethics (the costs incurred in fictionalizing oneself or others by exchanging "person" for "character"); and (3) a hermeneutic ethics (the ethico-critical accountability which acts of reading hold their readers to). These three categories will form the conceptual core of the readings in the following chapters. Since it is at the outset one of the grounding assumptions of this project that character and narration, like theme and form, presuppose each other, both in turn inflected by hermeneutic demands, these lines of inquiry should be understood as interlaced, though I separate them for clarity's sake. To recall, the first category refers to what narratologists call "narrative situation" or "narrative act," and what I have referred to, following Levinas, as "Saying"-the dialogic system of exchanges at work among tellers, listeners, and witnesses, and the intersubjective responsibilities and claims which follow from acts of storytelling. The word "relational," in fact, quite neatly captures the two qualities, interpersonal and discursive, which combine here in the domain of narration proper-in Coleridgean terms, the selecting out, stopping, and holding "one of three." The second category, as the concept of "life-turned-into-story" implies, denotes the small but still momentous distance that lies between person and character, or character and caricature, the gains, losses, and risks taken up when selves represent or are represented by others. Emmanuel Levinas has described the dialectic here in terms of the dis-enchanting nudity of "the face," on the one hand, and the forms or manifestations which clothe and mystify it, on the other: Here is a person who is what he is; but he does not make us forget, does not absorb, cover over entirely the objects he holds and the way he holds them, his gestures, limbs, gaze, thought, skin, which escape from under the identity of his substance, which like a torn sack is unable to contain them. Thus a person bears on his own face, alongside of its being with which he coincides, its own caricature, its own picturesqueness.... There is then a duality in this person, this thing, a duality in its being. It is what it is and it is a stranger to itself, and there is a relationship between these two moments. We will say the thing is itself and is its image. And that this relationship between the thing and its image is resemblance.... The whole of reality bears on its face its own allegory, outside of its revelation and its truth. In utilizing images art not only reflects, but brings about this allegory.

Narrative as Ethics

19

In art allegory is introduced into the world, as truth is accomplished

in cognition. 24 This idea of an essential doubling of reality-that, in the case of Anderson's story, people can be both fashioned out of thin air as well as bleached of their own humanness-ties acts of representation to responsibilities in a way which parallels the claim I make for the underlying conditions of actually telling stories. However, the epistemological parallel which Levinas draws between allegory and cognition suggests not only that fiction can operate as a kind of "knowing," but also that fiction's modus vivendi-its power to represent-at some level gives way before the more severe and plenary power of ethical responsibility. The last category, "hermeneutic ethics," suggests why an alternate title for this book could have been Peiforming the Text, since textual interpretation comprises both private responsibilities incurred in each singular act of reading and public responsibilities that follow from discussing and teaching works of fiction. 25 Reading, in effect, contaminates, just as storytelling in Anderson's text communicates its burden in both senses of the word. "You are perfectly free," as Sartre says, to leave that book on the table. "But if you open it, you assume responsibility for it.,,26 Responsibility for what exactly? For simply opening the book? For reading it? For responding to it? For putting it back? The responsibility is twofold. In part it means learning the paradoxical lesson that "getting" someone else's story is also a way of losing the person as "real," as "what he is"; it is a way of appropriating or allegorizing that endangers both intimacy and ethical duty. At the same time, however, one's responsibility consists of responding to just this paradox. To illustrate the first point-the price of getting a story-eonsider for a moment Anderson's tale in contrast to Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (which I discuss in detail in Chapter 3). For one thing, the story "Loneliness" is its own lesson; it reads itself, in advance of any "moral paraphrase." When readers turn to Lord Jim, by contrast, they find a conventional and perhaps deliberately banal sense of an ending. If Jim remains unclear to Marlowe, he has at least provided the satisfaction of storybook closure, a "heroic" death at yarn's end, so to speak. "He was not-if I may say so-clear to me," says Marlow. "He was not clear. And there is a suspicion he was not clear to himself either." A complaint]. Hillis Miller extends to observe that "interpret-

20

Narrative as Ethics

ing his story is a ceaseless movement toward a light which always remains hidden.,,27 I will have occasion to take this position up again, but here I wish to suggest that the process Miller alludes to, inside the text as well as "outside" it, needs to be recast in ethical terms (indeed, Miller's final words remind one of Levinas) if only to clarify the easy dialectic of inside/outside here. There is another sort of price to be reckoned beyond opacity, a price which Anderson's story, we could say, makes quite transparent. In "Loneliness," the cost of the process Miller describes for LordJim shows more dearly; the closer readers approach the light, the dimmer it becomes-not because of any internal self-occlusion, but as a response to the readers' proximity. To "get" someone's story in this regard-as George Willard uncritically does-is analogous to the belief in certain cultures that photographing a person's image in some way absconds with it. As is often the case in classical tragedy, recognition here exacts the price of a disappearance, an abscess caused by knowledge. That is, it is our staring, our looking for enlightenment, and our witnessing of Enoch which the story "knows" beforehand, and will hold us accountable for (in much the same way as a Jamesian puzzle story forces upon its readers the perturbations of hermeneutic self-consciousness). And for a text like this, perturbation, not privilege, and accountability, as opposed to free access, define the conditions of reader response. Reading this story takes the form of a constant drawing-nearer; and yet, paradoxically, the closer we approach the text, the farther away from it we get, and the more exorbitant our responsibility toward it consequently becomes-an infinte movement. Now the "task to be discharged" (in Sartre's phrase) which follows from the ethical constraint against fixing or fictionalizing a life story is, as I have said, a kind of negative capability of response. Consider in this light another document of self-reflexivity more famous than Anderson's "Loneliness": Velasquez's Las Meninas. In a brilliant analysis, Michel Foucault interprets Velasquez's painting as an allegory of subjectivity.28 Velasquez himself sits at the apex of a representational triangle ("Le regard souverain commande un triangle virtuel"), invisible as such, but twice reproduced through mirror effects; simultaneously in the picture and outside of it, he commands its dialectic of representation. All of what we see is circumscribed by, leads to, and follows from, his totalizing gaze. To look at the painting means granting its

Narrative as Ethics

21

painter legislative mastery, since his positionality wholly constrains the field of representation. While Foucault himself admits the dangers in moving between different orders of representation, in his case, from the visual to the literary, in mine, from Spanish painting to American short story, the works share certain effects in common. For instance, both implicate their respective audiences; ironically, they force responsibility outward. But the difference lies in this: where Velasquez fetishizes vision as a source of knowledge, Anderson depicts listening as an ethical act, response as responsibility. Where painter manipulates his own subjectivity's play of presence and absence, always answerable to his dictates, the story's narrator (here, admittedly, the formal analogy ceases to be precise) gives the story's progressive transfer of authority to the reader as his or her problem, so that "answerability" resides-taken up or refused-outside the story's representational and aesthetic limits. What readers answer for, as Cavell has put it, is their separateness before another's helplessness-in this case, the helplessness of literary character per se-derelict and stripped bare. Loneliness, we could say, implies not merely a circumstantial property but a textual one, the loneliness of an exposed, synthetic construct. True, we shut our eyes, and we shut out Velasquez; but the ethical drama of Anderson's story happens as we read. We never question Velasquez's hegemony while we subject ourselves to his painting, to his sly subjectivity. But in subjecting ourselves to the story we witness its authority change hands, and, ultimately, fall into our own. 29 One might object: nothing "falls into" anything here, and such a phenomenalist vocabulary merely reveals a basic misunderstanding of purely textual procedures. But "Loneliness" exactly concerns the desolation which attaches to the "purely" textual or acoustical (sound signifying a kind of notation). A literary character's voice imitates the intonation of spoken language, as Theodor Adorno once wrote of punctuation, but at the same time it confirms that no one is really "speaking." As "each carefully avoided mark is a sign of reverence shown by writing toward the sound that it suffocates,,,30 so the slow, deliberate distancing of Enoch signifies the "suffocation" of the pleas for help it simultaneously inscribes. "I felt that I would be submerged, drowned out, you see.,,31 Anticipating the formulations of theorists like Genette or Lucien

22

Narrative as Ethics

Dallenbach, Anderson the storyteller understands quite well the ease with which readers tend to conflate authorial and narrative audiences, transgress diegetic levels, or reverse enonce for enonciation, especially in self-consciously "addressive" texts like "Loneliness." Indeed, I want here to highlight the fact that such texts exacdy call for mimetic, performative acts from readers, in spite of the ontological and epistemic borders between fiction and reality. As ethical burdens, such acts represent, in Sartre's words, their "task to be discharged." Like a great deal of American short fiction, Hawthorne's, Twain's, or even Ring Lardner's, for instance, Anderson's text unapologetically invites the very ideological "confusion" which Paul de Man has identified as (linguistic) "reference" blurring into "phenomenalism."32 (At the extradiegetic, authorial level, Anderson, of course, presides over the seeming mise-en-abyme of embedded actions. But this is not to say that he, or even the implied author, stands at one end of the story's traffic of responsibilities, with the implied reader, then, at the other. The story works because it just does transfer those responsibilities through successive frames. Anderson's "role" as governing narrator remains essentially empty; his "function," in contrast, activates the autonomous workings of the text. In terms of children's games, one might make the analogy to the initial hander-off in "Hot Potato," rather than, say, the message sender in "Telephone.") Just as the "other" in Levinas assigns the self to obligation before it is willingly chosen, so Anderson's story teaches or commands some readerly transfiguration before the book is put aside and the mind has a chance to catch up. Like persons, texts present and expose themselves; the claim they make on me does not begin with dedicating myself to them, but rather precedes my discovery of the claim. 33 One can call this the imperative aspect of literature-the sort commonly exercised by conversion narratives like Augustine's or Thoreau's, or which Sartre generalizes to all literature in his essay "Why Write?" More than mere autonomous textuality is at work here then, I am arguing. Unlike the ritual communality which a theatrical performance can generate, "Loneliness," as its title also suggests, burdens each individual reader with both his own singularity, his own separateness, and the responsibility for the character's as well. Witnessing, overhearing, even reading, all involve a kind of passive culpability. If the story traces a sequence of exits at each diegetic level, it places ultimately, as I say, in readers' hands its recurrent problem of "live-exiting."34

Narrative as Ethics

23

Whereas theater provides a group confirmation of others' presentness, solitary reading-and especially the reading of narrative fiction, where voices are routinely lent out and impersonated-involves no such dispensation, since it leaves all differences intact between the reader and possible but invisible others. Indeed, perhaps the profoundest ethical dilemma which reading fiction poses is just the fact of solitude, that it is accomplished alone, forcing one's own single self against and into the world(s) of fictional others. Paradoxically, the situations it discloses for the most part remain intersubjective, yet the witnessing of them, so to speak, reduces to an audience of one, the single reader. 35 In the ethical dramas it rehearseshuman separateness and the claims of recognition-every reading, we could say, stages a "command performance," the legislative power here belonging not to author or to text but to the critical and responsive act. The very act of reading, in other words, like prayer or casual looking, permits things to happen. 36 The Sartrean argument for "responsibility" which I quote above dialectically links the correlative responsibilities of reading and writing, of "invention" and "disclosure," and grounds them in the obligation to be engaged, invested in somehow hooking literature up with the world; from this standpoint, one actively resists Kantian disinterest. Sartre's claim also recalls and clarifies the distinction I made earlier between a narrative ethics whose thrust is phenomenological and a deontological ethics of criticism. That responsibility introduces the question of critical allegiances (something I address below). By invoking the "ethical Sartre" I incur the risk of making my position sound suspiciously normative, perhaps not terribly far removed from the very brand of morally inflected literary theory which I claimed to distinguish myself from earlier. In a post-traditional world, traditions like this do not fare wel1. 37 My own formulation is introduced here after one final "textual" instance-from life-of the vexed relations among persons, their lives, and the stories they create.

True Story In an early essay, Mikhail Bakhtin remarks, "It is only when my life is set forth for another that I myself become its hero.,,38 Bakhtin is using "hero" in a very particular sense here: as the burden assumed in con-

24

Narrative as Ethics

structing one's life as a story for others. 39 For this entails more than merely an aesthetic challenge, and stands apart from conventional associations of outsize performance or larger than life "heroics." Elsewhere in the same essay, Bakhtin makes the related point that, because of their unique vantage point, others are more commonly the heroes of my own life than I am, able as they are to render me with an aesthetic generosity I myself am incapable of; to be narrated by others taps into a play of ethical-discursive forces. An uncanny literalization of these ideas can be found in A. R. Luria's The Man with a Shattered World, the painstakingly assembled narrative of a soldier nearly incapacitated by a severe brain wound. (The book is one of two discursive experiments in what Luria called "Romantic Science," or, as Oliver Sacks perhaps more aptly puts it, the "neurological novel.") The labor Luria's patient undertakes to construct himself through narrative, while extreme, does mark a universal passage from lived to told lives. It becomes, moreover, a collaborative effort through Luria's own interpolated analysis and empathetic, "novelized" commentary. In Bakhtin's terms, the victim, Zasetsky, reclaims his life with the greatest difficulty in the very process of telling it (indeed, only by narrating himself can he be said to possess himself); similarly, Luria, in the reciprocally creative role of co-authoring listener, bestows upon Zasetsky the gift of a narrative purchase on his life, to be gained only from outside it by a responsibly "authoring" other. Storytelling, again, lays claims upon all its participants, those circumscribed within the narrative as well as those Luria-like witnesses and ethical co-creators from without-its readers.

A Defense of Narrative Ethics I am aware of the dangers in collapsing the difference between the world of the text and the world which this final example of life-turnedinto-story raises, but I think it is fairly well established that narrative literature shares structures and assumptions with other forms of social understanding. The strong mimeticist position argues that narrative fiction is continuous with common structures of everyday experience. "The novel does not invent its structures," this position argues, "but heightens, isolates, and proceeds to analyze the narrative forms, methods, and motions of [everyday] perception and communication; some-

Narrative as Ethics

25

times explicitly, always implicitly, the novel is concerned to analyze the narrative forms of ordinary life.,,4o One need not dismiss this as so much naive reflectionism, since it merely suggests a continuous relationship between everyday narrative forms and those of literary texts. The question is, however, how to conceive of such a relationship. Is it unilinear and hierarchical? Or instead, interactive and reciprocal? Does it simply replicate at another level the dictates of ideology? Or does it resist and read against them? The questions are important and familiar, but the ones I pose here veer away from both ideological and deconstructive approaches. I argue simply that narrative prose fiction (particularly in texts leading up to and away from modernism), like real-world discourse, is subject to an "ethics." One of the discursive worlds it inhabits is an ethical one, manifesting certain characteristics which resemble features of everyday communicative experience. In the order they appear in my analysis, those characteristics are: first, the formal design of the storytelling act, the distribution of relations among teller, tale, and person(s) told (narrational ethics); second, a standing problematic of recognition, an anagnorisis that extends beyond the dynamics of plot to the exigent and collaborative unfolding of character, the sea change wrought when selves become either narrating or narrated (representational ethics); and last, "hermeneutics," as both a topic within the text and a field of action outside it, that is, a narrative inquiry into the extent and limits of intersubjective knowledge in persons' reading of each other, and the ethical price exacted from readers by texts (hermeneutic ethics). I claim an ethical status for such features because I believe they underscore an ethical mandate built into language use: vocative, interpellative, or dative impulses in utterance, we might say, which take narrative shape as address, command, plea, gift, and trust (or simply as "telling one's life story," depicted so compellingly in the example of Luria's Zasetsky), and which in the light of an alternate narrative counter-text of secrecy, gossip, coercion, or control become even more palpable. To mark how profound a "negative" confirmation of the ethical can be, it is enough to remember Miss Havisham's "authorial" influence on Pip's narrative self-understanding in Dickens' Great Expectations; or the various kinds of defective narration which conscript or deform their agents in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or Kate and Densher's insertion of Milly Theale as "character-function" into their joindy composed

26

Narrative as Ethics

"plot" in James's The Wings of the Dove; or the contaminant quality of human relations through confession or accidental language which supplies the moral fiber so unmistakable in the fiction of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. For this book, however, I have chosen another set of textual instances: the magic effect of personality in Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio; the shrinkage of personhood to sign in certain texts by James, Crane, and Melville, and, mutatis mutandis, its re-amplification through the delicately encrypted acts of autobiography ofJ. S. Mill or the narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains ofthe Day; the pulse of recognition hindered or achieved in Dickens' Bleak House. These will constitute the facets of the variegated model of narrative ethics which I develop in this book. I must emphasize, however, that the structure of fiction, that is, its status as both artifact and instrumentality, is not the structure of personal encounter; fiction justifies itself in part "by differentiating the practices of the world from the practices of representing it.,,41 Each of my readings will show that to ask phenomenologically, how is reading characters in a book like reading persons in life? or conversely, how is "facing" outside fiction like its counterpart within?-should not beg the implied question of isomorphism, but rather set before us two separate modes of intersubjective access, which is either solicited or denied. The limits bounding the ethics of fiction, in other words, are ones posed by reading and responding to fiction-to be reckoned as one performs and interprets a text-and not facilely breached in order to apply "lessons for life." The profoundest meaning of narrative ethics, then, may be just this sheer fact of limit, of separateness, of boundary. It engages us, it places claims upon us, not exactly as life and persons do, but similarly, and with similar ethical consequences. If, as the narrator of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot remarks, "truths about writing can be framed before you've published a word; truths about life can be framed only when it's too late to make any difference," then reading is an act which, in some way, does make a difference. Ethics assumes in this book the proportions of what in German is called das Stumme Wissen, "tacit knowledge," an integral though not always systematized or articulated given in a common field of actions and purposes. As practical wisdom, such tacit knowledge assumes that naming and negotiating the world occur not (or not ultimately) as

Narrative as Ethics

27

functions of obedience to invisible sites of "power," but through representational frames held in common, socially and cognitively fundamental. In what therefore might be called a chastened or self-aware essentialism, my analysis assumes that consciously or not we hold these "ethical truths" to be inalienable, if not always self-evident. Thus the most far-reaching claims for narrative ethics (like its outermost boundaries) are metaphysical. While some recent attempts to conflate ethics with politics seek to establish for ethics a greater status by default (a kind of borrowed credibility), I am insisting instead on its own critical legitimacy. 42 Political and historical contexts oftell write large the intersubjective details of narrative encounter (as I take pains to illustrate in Chapter 5), and thus the ethical need not be consigned to a realm lying outside history and politics. 43 Circumstances of narrative disclosure, their motives and their consequences, conduce, as I have said, to a set of ethical questions. These, however, remain distinct from (without supplanting) economic, cultural, or erotic power relations as analyzed, for example, by Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Ross Chambers, and others. Again, I propose that as specifically ethical claims exacted by narrative relationships, these terms are less contractual than immanent/transcendental: the limiting intersubjective conditions of the narrative imagination. Let me then briefly situate such ambitious claims against three alternative positions which I take up in the next chapter, but here enumerate specifically in terms of the relative weight each is willing to cede to ethics. Deconstruction The deconstructive refutation of such claims remains on its own terms irrefutable. I am incorporating its critique into this book not because I expect to contest its validity, but to draw out an important difference between two distinct ways of reading. That difference does not lie between two contrastive instrumentalities, methods, or viewpoints, two different kinds of cameras, so to speak, focused on the identical object. Rather, it lies in respective commitments to "facing": where deconstruction persists in immodestly "looking at" its textual objects (an attitude justified by recourse to its "scrupulosity" toward texts), narrative ethics calls into question that very performativity, that self-privi-

28

Narrative as Ethics

leging staring at texts conveniently legitimized by the fact that of deconstruction it should be said, "~a se deconstruit" ("it deconstructs itself").44 Narrative ethics asks about the impulse behind such staringwhether it is after all so very different from a similar impulse to stare at people. It is what Stanley Cavell calls "a specific response to the claim [people] make upon us, a specific form of acknowledgment; for example, rejection" (MWlVl, 331). Like Levinas' philosophy of ethical alterity, Cavell's concept of acknowledgment as the necessary response to an intersubjective claim assigns ethical action and language to a plane which is not primarily epistemological or ontological; such a plane lies transverse to or, as Levinas puts it, "otherwise than" the dimensions of being or knowing whose common project of adequation-the grasp after persons-it cuts across and interrupts. In discursive terms, the complementary relationship can be traced in the immediacy of a fictional text's representational and narrative acts, the varieties of narrative "capture": from the transfixing and hectoring of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or "Loneliness" to the dialogic surplus and redemption of The Man with a Shattered World. Extending Cavell, we could call these claims ethics' challenge to the claim of reason: "the claim of the other" or "the claim of narrative relations." This divergence in claim between ethics and epistemology is the difference between the genuine surprise which is to experience what is other and a refusal, as the philosopher Richard Cohen has put it, "to be taken by surprise. "45 To return to deconstruction, Paul de Man would argue that litera-. ture "knows" its own unreadability before criticism points it out, as I remarked earlier of Anderson's story that it "knows" the culpability, so to speak, incurred by reading. Practically speaking, of course, literary "knowledge" still requires exegesis, which, in de Man's case, plays out in rigorously epistemological fashion. De Man's enterprise (until the mention of ethics in the passage from Cohen) might seem to be predicated upon the same urge to subvert and demystify the "project of knowing," to expose, that]acques Derrida has said underlies Levinas' work-philosophy as ideology. Nevertheless, for all the severity of its conditions, de Man's project can be understood as occurring on exactly the same epistemological plane as that other project it wishes to deconstruct. It is, in a word, an economy (indeed, de Man speaks of all systems, including the parallax

Narrative as Ethics

29

of rhetorical criticism, as closed systems). Only by participating in the will to knowledge can deconstruction make its objections. The pathos of deconstruction is that it remains continuous with, not transverse to, the tyranny of self-knowing. The bad faith of deconstruction is that it cannot admit this.

Narratology If deconstruction countervails the role of ethics in literary theory, narrative poetics has done worse by ignoring it altogether. Fortunately, if one cannot fully "contest" deconstruction, one can, however, redress formalist indifference, and to accomplish that is one of this book's primary aims. Narrative theory-the attempt to construct a comprehensive model for the differentia specifiea of narrative form-has yet to account, adequately or fully, for the ethical in the narrative process as either a formal property (on the order of fictional patterns and structures) or a constitutive force (relations which bind tellers, listeners, and witnesses). I argue for just this formal and constitutive value for ethics in any accounting of the way narrative works.

N eo-Humanism Best understood perhaps as a response to the deconstructive position, neo-humanism (though superficially akin to my own) significandy misses what I take to be the main point. Neo-humanism centers on the vexed issue of "representation," maintaining that common notions of it are matters of nonarbitrary social practice. 46 After Kant, mimetic theories of literary character, in the ascendant through the early nineteenth century, come to seem less and less convincing; once literary texts become fully autonomous, representation becomes an extremely troubled concept. But instead of taking the extreme turn of substituting a linguistic pluralism for Kant's anthropology, neo-humanism reinterprets socioculturally the indeterminate but general harmony of faculties that, according to Kant, the aesthetic enjoys. Shifted thus into the phenomenal world, the world of selves tangled with selves and selves tangled with images, the moral value of art means exchanging aesthetic disinterest for social interest: aesthetics becomes a social performative, not

30

Narrative as Ethics

simply a "how to do things with art" but a "how art does things with (and to) persons." Although neo-humanism seeks to escape the charges leveled by Marxist critics at the liberal-humanist notion of the self, it still assumes a margin of individual interiority that remains opaque to theoretical analysis, since social typification also serves to protect individual privacy. But I see that margin as probably always subject to a shadow cast on it by the other: the self, as Bakhtin, G. H. Mead, and others have said, is a dialogue, inside and out. Thus, in my view, the delicate balance to which the neo-humanist position aspires does not entirely succeed. One result is an underestimation of the "price" at stake in textual engagement. To the solitary Kantian self, neo-humanists counterpose an overly generalized and impersonal process of social embedding for both literary character and person. Though meaning to claim for literature a valid continuousness with lived experience, they seem too willing to construe oppositionality in terms of Self and Culture, obscuring the challenge of alterity posed by a unique and concrete other. 47 Narrative fiction, I will argue, makes that challenge particularly keen, since confronting a text in its particularity both resembles and differs from the acts of human encounter which the story itself narrates, that is, the relation between subjects and what (or those whom) they objectify. Bakhtin uses the term "axiological" to describe this parallel dynamic between persons on the one hand and person and text on the other, a dynamic he locates in an individual's own singular, responsive, and historically concrete act of affirming value and conferring it upon reality. As an ethical imperative, this act exchanges epistemological abstractions for a participatory consciousness bound to a condition of "answerability" for cognitive and aesthetic choices alike; in other words, we "sign" what we re-present to ourselves-artworks or persons. Here, the interfusion of narrational, representational, and hermeneutic ethics which I spoke of above becomes clearest, the third category filling out and deepening the other two.

Textual Choices The thrust of my analysis, obviously, is not meticulously historicist, yet it seeks nevertheless to interpret and be accountable to the double

Narrative as Ethics

31

mediation in art specified by Theodor Adorno: once by general history, and again by the history of its forms. My vehicle is an ethical lens, an optic underutilized by critical theory. Thus although I make what may seem perhaps surprising leaps within and between chapters in my choice of texts, I see them as all related texts of narrative ethics. I focus on work which both anticipates and follows from literary modernism, British and American fiction from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The literary history I fashion here is driven by a hybrid of contextualist and immanentist assumptions, as I explain below. 48 Secure in the knowledge that any literary history is in part a restrospective in(ter)vention, I stand by the legitimacy of the organizing logic which informs my choice of texts here. It has become commonplace to typify modernity as both intrinsically "sociological" and reflexive, and to cite literary modernism's self-consciousness as one of its direct results. 49 I want to go beyond claiming a simple reflexive connection between modernity and modem fiction, however, to argue that formal innovations in the novel dovetail with an increased anxiety about what it means, simply, to render oneself, and to affect others, narratively; what does it mean to assume (or defy) the responsibilities which storytelling perforce assigns? Hence I have chosen a set of texts in which a kind of genealogy for such anxiety can be tracked: from novels and short fiction of the mid to late nineteenth century, in which the expressivist prerogatives of Romanticism undergo a pressure from within; through modernism's challenges to the stable narrative categories assumed by realist authors; to contemporary fiction, wherein the dynamics of telling a story, or of telling one's own story, becomes a topic in its own right, an intersubjective dilemma. Just as, for example, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has been read in terms of empiricist concepts of mind and eighteenth-century notions of the self as property, so the texts I have assembled here can be similarly historicized according to the intersubjective paradigm of narrative ethics. For many critics, however, it is the rise of the modern city or the invention of abstract labor by a market-driven economy or the legal and philosophical redefinition of personhood which underpins the transition from nineteenth- to twentieth-century styles of fiction. For example, Vincent Pecora has argued that the realist novel provides for the autonomous self a peculiar sort of home: no longer free-standing, Quixote-like, the individual continues to pursue an idealism it recog-

32

Narrative as Ethics

nizes as no longer tenable, positing an immanent "return to itself" in a world permeated by metaphysical homelessness. In contrast, modernist fiction disembeds the self entirely and, by abandoning the tempered irony which enables the self to be deployed as fictive construction in the first place, breaks faith "with the only home the novel has ever known."so Yet Pecora's thesis, in common with otherwise very different arguments by critics such as D. A. Miller and Richard Eldridge, suspends form between the twin poles of self and instrumentalizing societal power. 51 This operation, I believe, renders superfluous any third term such as "intersubjectivity," assimilating it to either one side or the other. But could \ve not say that narrative fiction, viewed intersubjectively, above all treats the circumstances and effects of human relations against the standing fact of heteronomy-tellers and listeners within, a multiplicity of readers without? And doesn't such messy entailment contest the great curve of autonomous selfhood which is so often construed to be the modern novel's prevailing "plot"? This is the quality of narrative relation which George Eliot, at the end of Middlemarch, terms "incalculably diffusive," the interstices between selves where, to borrow from Eliot again, "the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference." An alternative perspective on the complex shifts from realism to modernism to posttnodernism, then, will see the increasing internal pressures on narration and representation within the novel as forcing into attention its fundamentally addressive or performative nature-the telling of stories about the self and others, to the self and others. From this perspective, concepts of "home" or "homelessness" are first oriented by reference to concrete and singular moral others, not the equivalently abstract categories of subjectivity or "ideology." This is perhaps one way of construing George Eliot's phrase the "home epic" as a description for the intersubjective claim of fiction. But perhaps the most important point to convey about the particular texts I have selected is that I do not confine myself to works which openly declare their ethical import, or which stake out a recognizably "ethical" terrain. The readings cover texts by Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright, and Kazuo Ishiguro as well as those by Conrad, Dickens, and James. A theory of narrative ethics need not be determined by, nor does it necessarily arise out of, considerations about novels' or their authors'

Narrative as Ethics

33

moral or moralizing intentions. As I have said, it is concerned with the intersubjective dynamics of narrative, and their ethical implications, independent of the "moral paraphrases" which they may invite or which can be ascribed to them. Such dynamics are often governed by an immanent ethical-textual principle, as I demonstrate in detail in Chapter 4. (In this intrinsic sense, one might also speak of a pedagogical ethics, or a therapeutic ethics, features peculiar to a certain kind of communicative situation or discourse.) As for narrative ethics, the connection between the two terms will be defended in the next chapter against positions which deem it ideologically suspect or methodologically naive (poststructuralist and postmodern theory); superfluous (structuralist narratology); and a function of "judgment" and moral value affixed to content (Anglo-American rhetorical criticism and moral philosophy). I treat these positions extensively not merely to situate my own concerns, but also to draw out the very real ethical consequences of holding certain critical positions, indeed, of holding any critical position at all; in the deciphering of dreams also begin responsibilities. By linking the ethical consequences of criticism to ethical patterns and forms in literary texts, I hope to invest ethics with the kind of interpretive force exercised by the sharpest of contemporary ideological modes of literary analysis. But at the very least, even as regards the study of literature, we should resolve ourselves to the importance, as Levinas puts it, of knowing whether or not we are duped by morality (TI, 21).

2 Toward a Narrative Ethics Someone said, "Our right hand is in the book. But the left has the privilege of opening and closing. Thus both hands preside over the morrow of the book." Edmond Jabes, The Book of Dialogue

You read. You tie yourself to what comes untied-to what unties you within your ties. You are a knot of correspondence . . . a knot of innocence, craftiness, of things likely and unlikely, of infinite faithfulness. Edmond J abes, The Book of Questions

A book is interrupted discourse catching up with its own breaks. But books have their fate; they belong to a world they do not include, but recognize by being printed, and by being prefaced and getting themselves preceded with forewords. They are interrupted, and call for other books and in the end are interpreted in a saying distinct from the said. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

Evasions of the existence of others may take the form of smothering a person, or a text, with seemingly scrupulous questions. Michael Fischer, "Stanley Cavell's Wittgenstein"

35

Kafka wanted to know at which moments and how often, with eight people sitting within the horizon of a conversation, you have to speak up in order not to pass for taciturn. Maurice Blanchot, "Interruptions"

The Deconstructive Critique T o JUSTIFY MY observations about ethical confrontations in any practical sense, to make myself answerable to the dynamics of writing and reading, is to engage dialogically with contemporary criticism. I want to confront some of its most interesting faces, not so much to win an argument as to follow through on ethics' own discursive modus operandi. If the confrontation is to remain alive and in tension-not unlike the process of reading fiction-its anti-dialectic character is one lesson to be learned and cherished from deconstruction, the first and surprisingly the most fruitful interlocutor for a narrative ethics. The tete-a.-tete seems unlikely at first glance: ethics apparently imposes a responsibility to the world and the word, whereas deconstruction-especially the brand perfected by Paul de Man-seems to abjure such responsibility. But that easy opposition trivializes the tension in each term. And before I insist on the way they part company, I want to show the company they keep. Ethical answerability here is not a flattened prescription for action; it is not a moral recipe book. Nor is deconstruction an indifference to answerability; it is at its best a scrupulous hesitation, an extreme care occasioned by the treachery of words and the danger of easy answers. To predict where the dialogue between narrative ethics and deconstruction will lead, it is safe to say that the former exerts most pressure precisely at the point of a text's hesitations and interruptions, its caution before smothering interrogation. For ethics pauses before the impulse to flatten and rectify (a kind of fictionalizing), just as de Man's deconstruction stops before interpreting away the textual tension at hand. From a scrupled ethical perspective, of course, de Man stops woefully short himself, and his hermetic or paralytic precautions look like a kind of cowardice.

37

38

Toward a Narrative Ethics

In terms de Man himself develops in an essay on Kleist, deconstruction takes place in the gap between schwer and antitgrav, between falling and rising-a paradox of continuous movement as stasis, of grammar as trap (Flille). This is the "trick" which deconstruction plays and replays ad infinitum. And that is to say only that deconstruction thrives on, and casts itself in the image of, "suspended" discourse. By contrast, the epigraph from Levinas to this chapter speaks rather of "interrupted discourse." I will now investigate what that may imply within an ethical frame of reference. In staging this dialogue with deconstruction (as well as the antiphonal encounters which make up the next two sections of this chapter), I ask forbearance while I seem to "interrupt" the exposition I began in Chapter 1. It is precisely through such apparent interruption that a theory of narrative ethics catches up with its own breaks, so to speak, and consolidates its own voice: through the call for others' "Saying." I want readers to hear a polyphony of voices alongside my orchestration of them. I try, in any event, to steer a middle path between smothering critique (as the epigraph from Michael Fischer frames it) and anxious taciturnity (as described by Maurice Blanchot) by cleaving to what Jabes calls the "knot" of correspondences. What, then, could "interrupted discourse" mean? Levinas intends, it is safe to assume, both a certain (characteristic) dubiety about writinga fear that it impedes or defers the ethical immediacy of human speech-and a certain gratitude for the interventive nature of rational discourse-the fact that another's Saying (Ie Dire) will always interrupt and "unsay" the finitude of the Said (Ie Dit). In an essay appropriately entitled "Interruptions," Maurice Blanchot makes a similar point: "Discontinuity assures continuity of understanding ... To stop in order to understand, to understand in order to speak."l Speech, through interruption, unifies and connects. And yet, continues Blanchot, one can think of interruption in another way-language itself as nondialectical, as separation, cleft, gap: not "the pause that permits exchange, but [rather] the waiting that measures an infinite distance." Interruption, in this sense, means severance, incommensurability of horizons-in a word, writing: a relation with alterity not in Levinas' interpersonal sense of ethical encounter, but rather as the very structure of discourse, of inscription. Here language, through interruption, unsays itself. While I quote Levinas above because the fate of interruption he

Toward a Narrative Ethics

39

describes stands over the texts I read in this chapter (as well as my own book), "interrupted discourse" in this other sense enables me to broach the topic I treat in this section: the status ascribed to language and human relations by deconstruction. It is a concept not easily dismissed, not least because of its potential for ethical seriousness. Sympathetic or not, one therefore needs to exercise a little caution about hastily "summing up" deconstruction, or trivializing the nature of its "Said." Deconstruction, moreover, is not a monolith: it has its styles and its permutations. Thus if one is prompted to think of synonyms for "interruption," the first that comes to mind will probably not be "dissemination"-the language of textuality that never stops-but rather something closer to "disarticulation"-the language of expression broken up or voided from within. To tip my hand, one will discover (a word still meant in its double sense of "expose" and "find") the vocabulary of Paul de Man, not that of Derrida. And it is with de Man that the following dialogue with deconstruction takes place. 2 In the first place, any ethically charged argument for linguistic communication must take up the gauntlet thrown down by a proclamation such as this: "[since] language is not made by us as historical beings, it is perhaps not even made by humans at all, [not] in any sense human" (KT, 87). As both a theory of language and a moral position, this attitude simply demands a reckoning, especially since it contests the very position I wish to hold. In the second place, de Man is least convincing as a theorist of narrative fiction. As I observe below, his domain is Romantic and modernist epiphany, not narrative duration, up to and including the narrative "moments" which he selects from novelists like Proust. De Manian deconstruction, I submit, simply misconceives the uses of fiction; it is a blindness without any redeeming insight. (In this regard the essays on prose fiction which de Man wrote for Le Soir are simply anterior to the theoretical apparatus he was to elaborate later on, and therefore of less relevance to my purposes here.) Finally, in letting Blanchot serve as a kind of bridge over interruption between de Man and Levinas, I have indulged, I must admit, an ulterior purpose. Levinas and de Man share certain perhaps not altogether surprising resemblances (call them unelective affinities)-a severity, a prophetic kind of tone and conviction, and finally a shared skepticism about graven images that, given the cultural gulf that separates them,

40

Toward a Narrative Ethics

has some potentially fascinating implications. In other respects, of course, they stand worlds apart,3 but their parallel scrupulosity about human discourse presents a valuable point of contact. While I actually depend on Bakhtin and Cavell in this section more than I do Levinas, a facing (or face-off) between his work and de Man's seems quite natural to me. On a purely performative level, I have to say that I continue to find de Man's orthodoxy compelling, especially in the light of less uncompromising critics' pastiches or critiques. I am tempted to trace this effect to a (for me) unmistakable pathos lying at the core of de Man's project and motivating or standing behind its austerity-limned as all his work is now by its author's own posthumous, unwilled confrontation with, if I may put it this way, a narrative ethics. (I am wary, nevertheless, of using de Man's critical theory as a skeleton key for repressed features of his life.) It is the "resistance to theory" that de Man's ideas intrinsically pose to my own that warrants my attention (even though critical bias has now tilted away from such inhospitable altitudes toward more oxygenrich climes). While de Manian deconstruction calls into question all three of the narrative categories I introduced in the previous chapternarrational, representational, and hermeneutic-its primary target is the last, because of hopelessly divergent notions of interpretive sovereignty on the one hand and interpretive answerability (Bakhtin's phrase) on the other. In his essay "The Resistance to Theory," Paul de Man takes pains to explicate once again his view that texts refer neither to readers nor to readers' worlds, but only to themselves. He does not deny the referential function of language (a common misconception about his semiology); he denies only "its authority as a model for natural and phenomenal cognition" (lIT, 15). This may seem obvious enough on the level of light and sound, but it is less so with regard to the more general phenomenality of space, time, or especially the self; no one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word "day," but it is very difficult not to conceive the pattern of one's past and future existence as in accordance with temporal and spatial schemes that belong to fictional narratives and not to the world.... What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism. (KT, 11)

Toward a Narrative Ethics

41

In its asceticism regarding narrativity, expressed as the necessary distinction between two narrative "kinds" (textual versus real, or referential-that is, linguistic versus phenomenal), de Man's assertion implicitly drives a wedge between the very two concepts this book's title yokes together. It diagnoses, moreover, a certain confusion I seem to have about the correct ranking of discourses. 4 De Man elsewhere calls ethics a "category, not a value ... a discursive mode among others"s-in that sense, no different from any other mode or category where linguistic articulation remains discontinuous with both things and ideas (that is, as they might exist apart from language). For once things and ideas pass into language, they answer to its special laws of disarticulation. Of course, they are always already "in" language, and that's the rub. As philosophical discourse, however, ethics is mocked by its very pretensions to be meta-linguistic. Already "fallen" into linguistic unreliability, ethics proves its rank bad faith by asserting its claim to authority through somehow selfsufficient, legislative "values." And if ethics itself suffers from such structural errancy, then its entanglement with literature (narrative fiction, for example, which is ethically charged, structured, or self-situated) produces-with all the negative valence this word can carry for de Man-a "mixed" (that is, ideologically confused) mode par excellence. De Man contemns mixture. Metaphor, symbol, dialectic-all become prey to an almost puritanical bias, especially fervent in his later essays. (And correlatively, he sees literature's primary duty as that of fictionalizing into tropes its reading subjects.) Scrupulously, de Man will expose as category errors blurrings of linguistic and phenomenal orders of perception which invoke some false symbolic unity or dialectical synthesis. "Aesthetic ideology" is the favorite culprit here: Hegel's aesthetics, or Schiller's suspect and misappropriated Kantianism, the general belief that art can reconcile concepts and sensuous intuitions. 6 For de Man, the very notion of a narrative ethics would seem hopelessly confounded, since the flagrant linkage of narrative and ethics merely amplifies and doubly obscures the deep epistemological difficulties attaching to each as separate discursive modes. In his essay on Bakhtin, for instance, de Man nullifies the hope "that by starting out ... in a poetics of novelistic discourse one may gain access to the power of a hermeneutics" (KI, 113). Indeed, any poetics worth its salt will "disarticulate" such hermeneutics. And in his analyses of Rousseau (the

42

Toward a Narrative Ethics

closest he comes, I think, to addressing specifically narrative structures) de Man argues that language exhibits the greatest degree of ideological sophistication when it drives a wedge between subjectivity and language, when it demonstrates their absolute incompatibility. Implicitly, like the other nondialectical oppositions in de Man's work that remain intact even after deconstruction, "narrativity" in its two senses lives a prince and pauper kind of life. Either it applies to lived experience or it designates language (just as "ethics" can mean matters of practical performance or some meta-theoretical enterprise); but for each pair, the descriptive term refers to both alternatives at once only at its epistemological peril. Indeed, like analytical philosophers, we should probably make a practical distinction between "narrativity" and "narrativity'," or "ethics 1" and "ethics 2," depending on whether it was life or language we wished to refer to. But then in each case, the latter of the two alternatives-the "linguistic"-gives the lie to the ostensibly free-standing status of the former; or, as de Man puts it, "Morality is a version of the same language aporia that gave rise to such concepts as 'man' or 'love' or 'self,' and not the cause or consequence of such concepts.,,7 We are more "duped by morality" than we even knew. (Stanley Cavell would probably cast this whole matter of choosing between alternatives like "narrativity" and "narrativity'" in the same terms as he analyzes the Mariner's contestation of "the claims of know1edge": a venture to be staked perhaps but ultimately surpassed and left behind. "Not all the pointing in the world . . . will distinguish the one ... from the other. The trouble can be put two ways; you can't point to the one without pointing to the other; and you can't point to both at the same time. Which just means that pointing here has become an incoherent activity" [MW7\1, 320].8 Levinas, too, makes the identical point about skepticism's necessary complicity in the very knowing it rejects.) Although an interpretive stance such as de Man's carries persuasively, I think, for analyses of lyric poetry (hence de Man's critical preferences for the works of Yeats, Holderlin, Wordsworth, and Rilke or for overtly figural narration like Proust's or Rousseau's), its descriptive power diminishes when forced to account for how we read and experience drama or prose fiction. The never-ending debate over the ontological status and referentiality of fiction merely footnotes de Man's much larger claim that literary language (itself metonymic of

Toward a Narrative Ethics

43

"language") disfigures the humanity that bestows meaning upon it. As he is quoted as saying, "if you want to talk about men, you are in the wrong field. We can only talk about letters.,,9 Consider, in contrast, Stanley Cavell's trenchant analysis of the country yokel's confusion of reference with phenomenalism when he leaps on stage to prevent Othello's murder of Desdemona. Like some neo-Aesopian fool, he does seem to believe it possible to "grow grapes by the luminosity of the word, 'day'." By simply deriding such an impulse, however, one misses not only its poignancy, but exacdy the thing it seems to account for: that linguistic structures do have worldly consequence, that art, so to speak, gives off light, that phenomenalism spills over into reference. Citing Samuel Johnson's commonsense pronouncement that theatrical events are neither to be credited nor discredited, Cavell underscores its failure to take seriously the fact that an audience subjects itself or is subjected to the theatrical events staged for it; theater happens to us, we witness it, and our immobilization as spectators may therefore have something important to teach us about what it means merely to watch and do nothing. IO Almost as if in rebuttal to de Man, Cavell remarks that "the empirical and the transcendental are not as clearly separate as, so to speak, we thought they were" (MWM, 318). In contrast to the sort of confusion de Man finds, Cavell will argue that "tragedy [rather] arises from the confusion of these states": (1) acknowledging the separateness of others, and thus admitting a certain helplessness before them, and (2) failing to overcome the need to "know" and thereby assimilate their separateness. That failure, that knowledge, means not being "emptied of help, but [rather] withholding it" (MWM, 319; my emphasis). The title of Cavell's collected essays on Shakespeare places the problem squarely: Disowning Knowledge. Since that problem does not properly fit the contours of epistemology, after a certain point epistemological concerns must cede priority. Knowing, in Cavell's terms, gives way to acknowledging. II Such a renunciation in de Man's view would disguise a failure of cognitive nerve. Indeed, it cannot even be a critical possibility, since in drawing a limit to what we can know, we blithely ignore a limit already drawn for us by language; there is no such thing as nonlinguistic knowledge anyway. But contrariwise for Cavell, de Man's linguistic/natural opposition as it applies either to a split self or to a language itself divided does no

44

Toward a Narrative Ethics

more than name a problem. And the question here is whether a pedagogical or critical imperative for reading-call it "naming" unreadability-supersedes an intersubjective one. The question, in other words, is whether one names a problem, or substitutes for it the undertaking or assuming or enacting of one. Now, though such enactment precisely describes de Manian deconstruction's metier-at its best ethically rigorous in reading unreadability-what it enacts is simply the ethic of nondecision. 12 Thus the "problem" Cavell would like to transcend remains for de Man nontranscendable. Cavell's desire to do so, moreover, discloses his deep investment in "ideology," a temptation obviously "difficult" for him to resist. But what's "difficult" in Cavell's terms is not resisting unwarranted analogies between life and art, but rather resisting that resistance. Like the Mariner's skepticism, de Man's "rhetorical correctness" (if I may so put it) is a thing to be owned then disowned, exercised if only to be exorcised.

Another way I might put this is in terms of the "price" exacted by engagement with persons or texts. For de Man, I suggest, pays a price over and above that which his epistemological ethic demands: namely, the loss of a text's continuous presentness before him, as something to be either confronted or "interrupted," taken up or refused, acknowledged or merely, with all the negative valence Cavell attaches to the word, "known." De Man's crucial statement denying analogies between life and art (left atypically open), "The hermeneutics of reading and the hermeneutics of experience are not necessarily compatible" (ll, 62), assumes that one analogizes from empirical to linguistic structures (and back again). Any theories about literature which depend on such analogies betray themselves with the very disfiguring features of language they need to discount. Cavell's example of the yokel, on the contrary, goes in the opposite direction: it asks the question "How is human encounter like witnessing a theatrical performance?" or rather "What does our ontological separateness from aesthetic events have to teach us about the facts of separateness depicted there as well as those which constrain our daily interpersonal engagements?" Raskolnikov's waiting, in Sartre's astute phrase, "is my waiting which I lend him,"13 but it is at the same time only his, a fact of separateness, of difference I can but acknowledge (or withhold-a withholding which unlike ignorance, negatively confirms the acknowledgment I avoid).

Toward a Narrative Ethics

45

Literary texts-in their material self-sufficiency, in their matter-of-fact repudiation of whatever we wish out of them (they speak to us, after all, through our own acts of ventriloquism), allegorize the crevasse dividing person from person, as well as the techniques they invent (for seeming) to traverse it. My phrase "material self-sufficiency" may sound uncomfortably de Manian, but materiality here refers to a text's otherness on the analogy with a person, not to the dis-articulating properties of language. Construed this way, reading as ethical relation is the experience of exteriority.14 Or as Edmond Jabes memorably puts it, "The book never actually surrenders." But Raskolnikov is not a person, one wants to reply to Sartre; he is a literary character: to think of him as or as like a person subscribes to the error de Man calls "ideology." As should be clear by now, however, the issue I want to draw out here is not the ontological status of the literary character, but rather the special nonontological and ethical claims Raskolnikov, for exampIe, makes on readers. 15 Those claims belong to the realm of performance, not of speculation. To read a text like Anderson's "Loneliness," for example, means bearing some burden of responsibility, believing oneself addressed, and thus answerable-to the text itself, or to one's reading of it. De Man's deconstruction moots such answerability. Whether it is the represented character or the representing reader he makes the more fictitious entity, the site of a more negative insight about human subjectivity, subjectivity suffers evacuation-"a void [whose] persistent naming we call literature.,,16 How to respond to such an exorbitant notion? With the even more exorbitant demands of immediacy and exposure before the Other. If de Man views textual vigilance as resulting in interpretive vertige and the deconstruction of the reading subject, the radically ethical position sees it as justifying subjectivity in the first place. The task of selthood is proposed, called into being, from outside the self as answerability. Textual understanding, according to Levinas, "all happens as though the multiplicity of persons ... were the condition for the fullness of 'absolute truth,' as though each person, through his uniqueness, ensured the revelation of a unique aspect of the truth, and that certain sides of it would never reveal themselves if certain people were missing from mankind."17 In his early essays, Mikhail Bakhtin makes a similar point: "What can be accomplished by me cannot be accomplished by anyone else,

46

Toward a Narrative Ethics

ever.,,18 Selves are constituted in, or by, their answerability before others; they acquire meaning only through intersubjective horizons, horizons which surround textual as well as human encounter. In my triangulation of Levinas-Cavell-Bakhtin, it is Bakhtin who explicitly links these insights with narrativity. Toward that goal, he sees one's physical singularity in time/space (one's ir-re-place-ability, as Michael Holquist puts it) as standing for one's axiological uniqueness. That singularity enjoins responsibilities both aesthetic and ethical, the two not easily prised apart as they converge "in the unity of my answerability" (AA, 2). I want now to pivot this dialogue with deconstruction toward Bakhtin, because he directly challenges the de Manian split between poetics and hermeneutics. Indeed, such differences as mark their respective theories of language and hermeneutic responsibility seem to follow naturally from wholly divergent vocabularies. Bakhtin's writing is swollen with "phenomenalist" metaphors of sight, voice, and above all personhood ("I-for-myself," "the others-for-me," the "mask of selfhood"); like Levinas, he conceives identity as an entirely sensible phenomenon: "After all, it is only the other who can be embraced, clasped all around, it is only the other's boundaries that can be touched and felt lovingly.... Only the other's lips can be touched with our own, only on the other can we lay our hands, rise actively above the other and 'overshadow' all of him totally" (AA, 41). Myriad small narratives about selves in relation to others complicate and soften the analytical thrust of these essays; technical nomenclature and style constantly give way (as they do in Levinas) to a kind of rhapsodic ethics about human interaction. 19 De Man's writing, by contrast, again and again exploits the language of melodrama and violent crime-"disfigurement," "de-facement," or most ghoulishly, in a passage about derivative, secondary languages in his essay on Benjamin: "They kill the original, by discovering that the original was already dead.,,2o If the word "intersubjective" has a referential value for de Man, it consists of two equally dismaying possibilities: either the condition of a split self (the Heideggerian doubling of the self into two empirical and ontological entities) or the mutual deconstruction of author and reader: "Both parties tend to fuse into a single subject as the original difference between them disappears" (BI, 10). De Man exerts relentless pressure to crack open the self from

Toward a Narrative Ethics

47

within, to see it fissured, permanently alienated, made de trap by language. Bakhtin, conversely, conceives of intersubjectivity as linguistic salvation-the liberation of dialogism. 21 The self's inner division is a sign of life, not estrangement, since it records the presence of others, the saving heterogeneity of consciousness: "[considered singly] consciousness is more terrifying than any unconscious complexes" (quoted in RB, 198). An epistemological gain surfaces here. In an individual's "answerability," which forms a link between cognition and the objects it invests with meaning and value, mind and world discover a certain harmony. As in Kantian philosophy, formal analogies between the cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic create an architectonics. Bakhtin avoids the "theoretism" of Kant's faculty psychology, however, by refining those analogies into a "philosophy of the act," the singular deed of evaluation which, though self-responsible-signed by me (as it were)-can never be limited to or identical with the self because of exteriority's gravitational force-selves aim outwards toward others.22 But the crucial divergence between de Man and Bakhtin takes place on a plane other than cognition. Bakhtin would find simply incoherent de Man's Heideggerian drive inward into some inalienable authenticity (or authentic alienation) or his later obsession with wholesale "disarticulation." "A human being experiencing life in the category of his own I is incapable of gathering himself by himself into an outward whole that would be even relatively finished" (AA, 35). Bakhtinian ethics exposes the de Manian self's need to subtract from without as it fissures from within, exposes the fact that truth, for de Man, works by expropriation: truth is "always something that must always first be wrested from entities," as Heidegger put it in Being and Time. 23 As I argued for Anderson's story in Chapter 1, narrative fiction and the resistance (and vulnerability) it can offer to the imperious reader dramatize the cost of such (de)privation, of the drive toward knowing at the expense of acknowledging. Instead of "an unveiling which destroys the secret," interpretation should mean, as Benjamin wrote, "the revelation which does it justice."24 Bakhtin conceives one's relation to meaning, rather, on the level of exigency, bestowal, gift. Immediately after his example of the "naive spectator" (which I cite in my note to the identical case in Cavell), he says:

48

Toward a Narrative Ethics An ultimate issue out of itself is not immanent to a lived life: it descends upon a life-lived-from-within as a gift from the self-activity of another-from a self-activity that comes to meet my life from outside its bounds. . . . The organizing power in all aesthetic forms is the axiological category of the other. . . . [When I abandon the futured vision of my unfinalizability] the only thing left for me to do is to find a refuge in the other and to assemble-out of the other-the scattered pieces of my own givenness. ("Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," in AA, 79-81)

Or as a character in Toni Morrison's Beloved puts it from the opposite perspective, "The pieces that I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order." These co-efficient grants of meaning take place "on the border of two consciousnesses"-in time and space and in story form. Thus in its orientation to others and in the irreducible difference between itself and another, the self suggests not merely a dialogic but a "novelistic" entity-defined by some necessary sort of narrative orientation to others. And it is, of course, precisely this awareness of the novel which de Man's work lacks-the genre most saturated by, as Bakhtin puts it, "the living word." Recall, for a moment, the two orders of interruption I began with. What we find in Bakhtin is interruption on the level of the Saying: a call for stories which are themselves interrupted in turn. "Every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word it anticipates" (D!, 280). Not interruption as if on a Riemann surface 25-broken up and hollowed from within-but rather interruption as exchange: "Now wherefore stoppest thou me?"-to stop in order to understand. Since the very fact of alterity obliges a constant interplay across the borders of self and other, each held mutually hostage by a constant exchange of surpluses of meaning accessible only from outside, a narrative is ethics in the sense of the mediating and authorial role each takes up toward another's story. The "gift-giving, consummating potential" (as Bakhtin puts it) that one bears another is most meaningfully bestowed narratively-across time, and through a call of/for stories. De Man, in his essay on Bakhtin (based on a reading of "Dialogue and the Novel"), seizes on the incompatibility of poetics and hermeneutics as they collide in Bakhtin's work in order to "interrupt," as it were, dialogism from inside. De Man reads Bakhtin carelessly, however. 26 After isolating the incriminating presence of a phenomenalist

Toward a Narrative Ethics _

..

49

------------~"------~-----_._---

vocabulary in a certain passage, and censuring the "illegitimate" modulation from dialogism to a hermeneutics of question and answer shortly thereafter, de Man concludes, "The ideologies of otherness and of hermeneutic understanding are not compatible, and therefore their relationship is not a dialogical but merely a contradictory one" (KT, Ill). But the talk of incompatibility is familiar, since de Man merely suspends the otherness of Bakhtin's text by refusing to engage it, in Maurice Blanchot's phrase, "under the sign of the neutral.,,27 The recurrent "evidence checkpoint" in de Man's criticism illustrates not only its circularity but, more important, its unsatisfiable demand for more knowledge, and the narcissism and privation such lmowledge endlessly rehearses. An intolerance of exteriority, a moralist's zeal for disclosure-de Man's incessant probing and wresting make language into a house of detention, and convert readers into its jailer-detainees. Let me be clear about this. The profoundly anti-ethical thrust of de Man's deconstruction does not stem from its need to champion "undecidability" or "polysemy," or from any other threat to the literary or social fabric. That argument, I believe, is a strategic error made by liberal and conservative critics alike attesting to the weak (pluralist or authoritarian) model of ethics they hold in common. Rather, ethics finds no place in de Man's theory because of his absolute reification of epistemology. Ethics is nullified beforehand: meaning not just simply disclosed "in the full light" (Levinas' phrase), but pre-understood-totalized, digested, "precisely thought."28 Bakhtin perhaps best deflates the hyperbole and hubris of such a project, no less "fruitless" in its intent than wanting to "grow grapes by the luminosity of the word 'day"': "All attempts to overcome the dualism of cognition and life, of thought and singular concrete reality from inside theoretical cognition are absolutely hopeless ... [tantamount to the attempt] to lift oneself up by one's own hair" (quoted in RB, 8). The point here is precisely not to pose an epistemological rejoinder to deconstruction; John Searle's fate of literal incorporation and disfiguration (into SARL, as Derrida cuttingly dubbed him) by the very discourse he thought to debunk should prove at least instructive.29 What's warranted instead is an oppositionality in the Levinasian sense: interruption, or the over-going by the Saying of the Said. That is why I have enlisted the aid of LeviIlas, Bakhtin, and Cavell: to "interrupt," as it were, de Man's hypostasis of "interrupted dis-

50

Toward a Narrative Ethics

course." What interrupted discourse really amounts to is a peculiar kind of post-Kantian version of autonomy. And in a post-Kantian world, concepts of autonomy and freedom tend, de rigueur, to be linked to "language" without any reference to the human attributes or ideals they may (erroneously) symbolize. As Tobin Siebers puts it, this "shift ends by radically altering Kant's idea of pluralism, robbing it of its human context and transforming it into an issue of language . . . [that is, that language] does not permit judgments, that it defers differences.,,30 But linguistic pluralism seems to me untenable without some sort of philosophical anthropology to undergird it. If the Kantian framework is to be linguistically reinterpreted, Bakhtin's concepts of signature and tone (the concrete and particular meanings individual language uses "underwrite") or Cavell's morally democratized and communal acknowledgment would seem far better suited to maintain a Kantian bridge between ethics and aesthetics, while opening that bridge up to a genuine heteronomy of ends. 31 I bring this dialogue with deconstruction to a close with a final dialogic "interruption": de Man's essay on Kant. De Man uses the Critique of Pure Judgment to illustrate how its letter, despite its spirit, carries on an (as it were) autonomous and immanent critique of aesthetic ideology. Aesthetic judgment, the metaphor-laden and duplicitous structure which bridges a priori knowledge and empirical experience, ends up arrogating to itself the mental concepts and practical interest it should by rights eschew. That Kant's language betrays his philosophical intentions, that a resistance can be detected between his text's "materiality" and its lapses into a "phenomenalist" register, that his text exposes the cleavage between faculties which aesthetic judgments falsely reconcile-all this secures the text's permanent value for de Man as a model of self-deconstruction, particularly because it is philosophy, not literature. De Man's reading, though brilliant, remains perverse. It enters the interiority of Kant's text, in Levinas' words, "as if by burglary" (TI, 67) and leaves the "disfiguring" imprint of an alien presence. The term Levinas applies to such invasive "occupation" is "totality": the drama which casts its roles in advance, whose actors cannot be its authors, and whose outcome another knows beforehand-the very "inverse of langauge" (TI, 79). De Man's essay does, however, serve as an important bridge to my

Toward a Narrative Ethics

51

discussion of narrative poetics because of the contrast it draws between Kantian aesthetics on the one hand and post-Kantian ideologies that blindly champion their "confusion" on the other. Latter-day formalisms, as Christopher Norris has observed in Paul de Man, Deconstruction, and the Critique ofAesthetic Ideology, operate in exactly this same spirit, being the lineal descendants of their organicist precursors. If, finally, de Man's rhetorical criticism profoundly misunderstands the experience of reading fiction, it nevertheless expertly assesses the often totalizing pretensions of literary theory. Since formalist theories of narrative account for a goodly number of these, in particular the claim to have left the "ideological confusion" of ethics behind, I turn to them next.

Formalisms Critical and Ethical: A Short Story While Paul de Man was bearing witness to the incommensurability of poetics and hermeneutics, poetics by itself-in the form of structuralist narratology-was industriously honing its techniques, its analytic precision, and its specialized nomenclature. It wanted very much to don the mantle of "pilot science" of literary studies. Since the story of narratology is a Bildungsroman, urbanity, maturity, and the advent of new fashions speedily generated embarrassment, if not outright contempt, for jejune tastes since outgrown. And so a trunkful of such items-"theme," "reliable narrator," "moral imagination"-was consigned to village oblivion, poked around in occasionally by passers-by or those "versed," as Robert Frost put it, "in country things," but for the most part happily forgotten. After a short while under city lights, some of this outmoded attire was discovered to possess a vintage modishness heretofore unsuspected, for instance, "point of view," which was revamped to a more contemporary cut-"focalization"-and trimmed of any telltale signs from its more arriere-garde youth. Unfortunately, as the conventions of this genre dictate, a "dressing down" could not be far off. Thus was narratology put in its place by those more versed in city things-like poststructuralist couture. And thus, its wardrobe not a little threadworn, does narratology languish even now, in the comeuppance that is Bildung. It has not, Stephen Daedalus-like, forged the uncreated conscience of its field. Nor has it felt the need to return to the forge like Pip. But it has, like Lord Jim, "missed its chance"; its aspirations for

52

Toward a Narrative Ethics

any "pilot's" mantle which says sartorially, "I am unimpeachable," have, regrettably been laid aside. I have described the fortunes of narrative poetics as a story for a reason. Its "dressing down" at deconstruction's hands made of it "a tragic critical practice-tragic because at once inescapable and doomed to alternate, without the possibility of totalization, between its dependent constituents.,,32 Those constituents are story and discourse, the plot "as it happened in time" and the plot "as it is told," the former, of course, being logically prior to the latter. Or is it? Could it not be said that in telling a story of chastened ambition and dashed expectations, I was merely bending the "events" of narratology's deconstruction to the will of purely discursive and generic decisions? And don't these criteria make of the story "a story" as much as the real-time sequence of events that "really happened"? Whichever option you prefer, the deconstructive "sequel" to narratology's "story" demonstrated that emphasizing only one of its dependent constituents-story, for instance-forces the other one-discourse, in this example-to become, as Wlad Godzich put it, "a perturbatory element rather than a resolving one." But this is by now an old story. Deconstruction's dismanding of the histoirelrecit or fabulalsujet distinction now perhaps appears no less reductive than narratology's fond hopes, which deconstruction so eagerly subverted. Like the supplement that it is, deconstructive criticism simultaneously "interrupts" and prolongs structuralist prejudices (something Gerard Genette himself admits in Narrative Discourse Revisited). Deconstruction's more damaging accusation-that narrative discourse is, like any other, prey to tropological forces it cannot control-narratology need not bear alone; all criticism devoted to analyzing stable linguistic structures assumes the same "tragic burden." Again, for all its acuity, deconstruction merely "names a problem," it seems to me. De Man, for instance, criticizes formalist reductions of figure to grammar, but only because "rhetoric" supersedes, by exercising power over, both. Fortunately, however, all grammars leak (as Edward Sapir once observed), even rhetorical grammars. And in the past decade narrative theory has gready enlarged its own sense of grammar: "perspective," "voice," "consciousness," and "situation" have all generated ilnportant critical work. Indeed, since Gerard Genette, Mieke Bal, and Gerald Prince began to systematize categories other than the relation of events

Toward a Narrative Ethics

53

to their discursive presentation, narrative theory much less comfortably fits the pinched contours of the satire I sketched above. But in another sense, it remains still very much dual. The old "ideological" schism between form and content is hard to shake. In Genette's words: "Apparently, there is room for two narratologies, one thematic in the broad sense (analysis of the story or the narrative content), the other formal or, rather, modal (analysis of narrative as a mode of 'representation' of stories, contrast to the non-narrative modes like the dramatic and, no doubt, some others outside literature)" (NDR, 17). Like any good binary opposition, this one subordinates while it opposes-Genette assigns methodological rigor to modal, not thematic analysis. It also begs for and deserves to be deconstr"ucted: into the content of form and the form of content. 33 But even sans deconstruction, the narrative movement from deep syntax to textual surface, to choose an example from Algirdas Greimas, needs to be explained in terms of messages as well as codes. "Operations" of practical reason, the "field" of social relations and values, playas fundamental a role in narrative structure as the logical operations of contrariety, contradiction, and supposition, or the field of actantial permutations. 34 Consider, for example, that "theme" or "topic" can be interpreted narratively (what or how the story tells), discursively (what or how subjects tell), or figurally (what or how grammar, syntax, and lexis tell); "content" suddenly appears a far weightier analytic matter. 35 "Voice" possesses both a form and a content; "point of view" involves an interdependence of percepts and concepts. 36 Structural entanglen1ents of teller and listener defy analyses which privilege their independent roles. (Genette's clarifying distinction between "who speaks?" and "who sees?" still resolutely avoids filling out the truncated predicate in each case, because the subject's positionality presides for him over intersubjective relations.) Whereas deconstruction cannot allow the ethical category status, narratology tends to deny it formal consideration. But excising the "price" of encounter, the "mark" left by Saying, ignores the extent to which strictly figurative properties such as metaphor become experiential, the way characters, as in Hawthorne and James, can become inculcated figures of speech. It leaves to characters and text the fate of Poe's M. Valdemar, who was immobilized yet still alive, and prompts Levinas' observation that "a novel shuts beings up in a fate despite their freedom ... [a fate] like being buried alive.,,37

54

Toward a Narrative Ethics

Moreover, confining ethical analysis to the abstract realm of "values" simply duplicates the identical, now discredited strategy of meta-ethical theorists in philosophy. To broach such concepts as temporality, point of view, or agency while confining them entirely to thin descriptions of autonomous narrative structures to my mind bears out de Man's anxiety about reified aesthetic formalisms. 38 Methodological rigor need not exclude "perturbatory" links between clearly related domains, which is another way of talking about literature's selective "resistance to theory." (This straitjacketing of ethics can be at least partially attributed to traditional ethical criticism, whose own essentialist moves merely encouraged bloodless formalist correctives.) But perhaps most important, like deconstruction's decisions, narratology's determination to delimit narrative analysis this way have an extraordinarily ironic consequence: willy-nilly, formalist/structuralist theories of narrative incur an ethical responsibility precisely because they eschew it. To recall Godzich once more, it is ethics which in this case becomes the "pertubatory" element rather than the "resolving" one. ("Perturbatory," in this context, signifies for me narrative ethics's critical vigor.) To truncate narrative discourse by fitting it to a scientific model it overreaches is to impoverish it narratively as well as ethically. Narration and representation cannot be explained without reference to ethical considerations of agency; "functions" and "roles" liquidate the substantial self. Since I have reintroduced here two of the three axes upon which my own study is based-narration and representation-I want now to examine more carefully how each has fared in narrative poetics, and suggest how they can be more thickly described. Representation Like it or not, some version of "reflection" has to describe the mediation of text by life and life by text. For instance, one can speak of a rough homology between the world as "always already" experienced through a set of frames and representations and fiction as a second-order, correlative system of signification. As Theodor Adorno and others have argued, however, the "order of mimesis" cannot simply duplicate the authoritarian order of the real, that is, it cannot command or order, because it necessarily disorders what it finds. 39 Indeed, it is often quite violent in the transpositions it effects, exposing the fictiveness (and

Toward a Narrative Ethics

55

violence) of real-world categories like homogeneity or readability. "Homogeneity" constitutes not a brute fact of the world, but a template through which cultures regulate experience. But if we grant that literary texts in some way reflect states of reality, does such reflectionism need to be taken as naive? Barthes's distinction between writerly and readerly texts, for instance, insists that it is the former which corrects for the latter's "nauseating" closure and reduplication of ideological constraints; thus, Balzac's short story "Sarrasine" represents a borderline text in which subversive forces can be seen rapidly encroaching upon the blandly bourgeois status quo. But this distinction rests on a selective idea of the forces of subversion: erotic desire, in this instance. But persons are routinely subverted in all sorts of nonerotic ways: by projections of "character" upon them, for example, or the indiscreet effacement of discrete selves through typification. Allegory is a fate literary characters are often consigned to--by their authors as well as one another. Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, an obvious case, shows how allegorical modes of perception can imprison social relations far more effectively than any stocks. No wonder Hester's Pearl seems unreal; she is in effect the child of allegory. To recall Levinas' words, "the whole of reality bears on its face its own allegory, outside of its revelation and its truth." Literary fiction, then, simply echoes a self-fictionalizion already intact as a possibility for ordinary human interaction. 4o The power of representation over personhood casts a peculiar light on formalism's tendency to blanch those very features of representation which the process of narrative fiction makes apparent. As it is for so many kinds of reading, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein serves as the classic cautionary tale here. Formalist theorists devise theoretical constructs to substitute for fictional "instantiations" of them, when in doing so they reenact the (often monstrous) exchange of substitutions between character and person that texts already depict. Might we not think of such models as unconsciously "deforming" persons in ways that literature either avoids or knowingly exploits? (Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan makes the pertinent observation, for instance, that in dissolving person into "character," and character into text, semioticians are only following the lead of modernist writers such as Woolf, Stein, and Kafka.)41 And yet I must draw a crucial distinction here: as Ricoeur and Adorno in different ways observe, narrative fiction puts its readers in the dock by requiring them to refigure what it configures: to witness

56

Toward a Narrative Ethics

it, to let the text happen to them in such a way that they are, in Ricoeur's phrase, "produced in front of it." Conversely, formalist criticism avoids this recurrent question of answerability by locating its judgments behind the workings of the text, limiting its role merely to matching objective description with textual fact. As in my critique of the deconstructive position, I am interested here in pursuing the degree to which ethics exerts a negative pressure exactly within a "scientific" practice which had tried to dismiss it; the relation between ethical and literary form is not so fungible. When one takes ethics to imply didacticism or subservience for literature, one finds an impoverished notion of ethics. Concomitantly, when one takes what Roman Jakobson called the poetic function to represent the totality of a work's signification, so that "psychological" or "evaluative" structures are deemed invasive and unscientific, one is working with an unhealthily reified notion of literature. The mobile drama of the individual person, whether as subject or intersubject, is refractory to systems which try to digest or eviscerate it. The variety of terms which designate a single human entity-self, character, individual, person, agent, figure, protagonist, soul-attests to the stubborn historicity of each, which resists the false recuperations of diachronic and intercultural comparisons that flatten persons out. And each one of these terms, in turn, signifies certain extensional properties: character and characteristics, person and choice, self and property, individual and right. A full account of narrative representation needs to provide for the differentiated picture these terms suggest. 42 At bottom, however, one still needs to reckon with the brute fact of the obstinate mimeticism of readers and texts. Both not only grow, but pick, eat, and seem to enjoy their linguistic grapes, de Man notwithstanding. Need we understand this obstinacy solely in terms of the ideologically manipulative norms of "common sense"? (In mimeticism's "scandalous" refusal to disappear, one is reminded also of the pertinacity Levinas and Cavell both ascribe to skepticism.)43 Should "resisting novels" or "reading (the) oppositional (in) narrative,,44 exhaust our repertoire of postmodern strategies designed to compensate for earlier "confusion" and malaise? Perhaps, in fact, we overcompensate. Consider that we miss the point of "mimetic illusion." It was (and still is) always on some level just that: a knowing deformation of the real. Consider, moreover, that such

Toward a Narrative Ethics

57

illusionism in literature apes a similar phenomenon in real life and, further, that certain texts actively measure, analyze, and critique it. This is literature as a kind of biotechnology-the purposeful cross-mixing of reference and phenomenalism. Since literary texts thematize illusionism-which can be rephrased as "a certain resistance to the claims of otherness"-on at least some level, one needs to suspend Ideologiekritik, to actively resist one's own resistance. (The most sensitive readings of Aristotle's Poetics in fact isolate just this critical sense of milnesis.)45 To make my position clear: one of the "functions of criticism," as I see it, is to follow the lead of literary texts by mediating their mediations. Thus I do not at all demur from criticism's need to resist the truth-claims of bourgeois normativity, its legitimation of powers that be. (Take the verb in this end phrase as active, and you arrive at Levinas' critique of ontology: powers that be.) I do, however, want to call attention to the role which the hermeneutics of suspicion already plays in lived experience well before it becomes a critical strategy. That is something, as I said earlier, which texts like Anderson's short story "know beforehand"; they know that they are being read, in other words. As an analogy to what one could call the hard Levinasian kernel of alterity at the bottom of every mediated encounter (in world or text), one might cite the Lacanian thesis about the real-that behind the mask of everyday appearances there lies a surplus, a remainder of reality which cannot be assimilated to "illusionism," but which is still only accessible through that same play of mirrors.46 But the important point here is the dialectical relation between fictional world and real worldthe play of representation "across the borders" between them. (The self is already borderline, anyway, always "half someone else's," as Bakhtin puts it.) Fictional narratives do not just offer us a "laboratory" in which to study this overdetermination of otherness within intersubjective horizons-how characters and authors construct others in order to escape a certain deadlock of/in subjectivity. More important, perhaps, they elicit this very same process in the performance of reading. To "resist" this textual elicitation means balking at an ethical demand to "undergo" a book by reading it. I develop a theory of such "representational ethics" over the course of chapters 4 and 5, and apply it in various contexts in the remaining

58

Toward a Narrative Ethics

chapters. What the texts I assemble have to "say," I argue, initiates a chain of critical responsibilities. To read a text such as Henry James's "The Real Thing" as simply "exemplary," already misrecognizes it since it enacts a critique of "illustrativeness" per see If Dickens' Bleak House politicizes representation as "a matter for the police" (Christopher Prendergast's apt phrase),47 Stephen Crane's story The Monster, transforms that politicization into cultural decisions about what will constitute recognition and who will count as recognizable in the first place. The common theme shared by all these texts is recognition-an extension of the trope of anagnorisis beyond the restrictive contours of emplotment, detection, or subjective identity. Narration Since the readings of Coleridge and Anderson in Chapter 1 anticipate much of what I have to say here, I shall move quickly. The topic of narration has recently fared better than representation in narrative theory, one must say, almost certainly because of its "transactional and contractual" nature, which draws particular attention to the shaping of power relations in, and by, literary texts. At the same time, this healthy attention to the performative function of storytelling frequently serves to demonstrate the power of representation, since narrators dictate conditions and, in so doing, reify their authority. (One sees how, even methodologically, representation and narration do not easily separate.) Thus the authority increasingly inscribed in literary texts themselves gradually compensates for the decrease in the storyteller's authority, which Walter Benjamin chronicles in his essay of the same name. (The most self-aware of such texts in turn inscribe an awareness if not critique of that very "inscription.") At least four directions for these implications now limn the critical landscape: Marxist, psychoanalytic, semiotic-performative, and political-ideologica1. 48 All four perspectives share a common concern with narration's contextual conditions, the situational features which mobilize social relations and, in Ross Chambers' words, give "force and point to ... storytelling" (SS, 6). Structuralist narratology made a point, as I have noted, of eschewing "point" in its attempt to theorize the invariant components of narrative structure, reducing it to the superfluity of "theme," and narrowly confining situational conditions to perceptual details: point of view or focalization.

Toward a Narrative Ethics

59

Each of the four perspectives I list above, by contrast, convincingly rehabilitates point, "to focus attention onto the need, not simply to read texts in situation (which is inevitable) but also to read, in the texts, the situation that they produce as giving them their 'point''' (55, 4). Prose fiction, in other words, models its own storytelling circumstances. Whether overtly, as in Henry James's "The Figure in the Carpet," or indirectly, as in Conrad's Lord Jim, narrative fiction can stage its own transactional procedures within the text. Unfortunately, each of these same four perspectives tends to limit this important observation to only certain lines of argument. Chambers' description of the narrative act as "seduction," for example, unduly generalizes the erotic component in narrative (and in reading) to the act itself. Storytelling becomes a contract relation fueled by desire and desire alone-desire enacted, transposed, or refused; even the desire for closure figures a sublimation of erotic desire. Any narrative act in this view is necessarily an act of seduction. 49 Any narrative act can be, of course, but whether it must be (and this does seem to be Chambers' "point") seems to me an instance of definitional aggrandizement. To be fair, Chambers explains that the nineteenth-century texts he studies all exemplify narrative seduction because "seduction" marks their historicity in the development of the novel-a tradition in place, one notes, since Cervantes, Richardson, and Laclos. Chambers' methodology-in particular, the principle of textual reflexivity through self-situating-provides quite valuable tools for analysis. 50 But the underlying assumptions are insufficient, as I want to underscore by turning again to Shakespeare's Othello, to compare Chambers' comments on Othello's wooing of consort and court with the same example as treated by Stanley Cavell. At the end of The Claim ofReason, in a section titled "The Stake of the Other," Cavell adverts to Othello's murder of Desdemona as the quintessentially violent admission/denial of the claim which her separateness makes upon Othello. Cavell's analysis shows that narrative acts can commit discursive violence not exclusively because of their power to seduce. In making Desdemona enamored of him through narrating his exploits, Othello also compels from her a certain kind of recognition, just as Iago twists that need by fabricating a story in which recognition degenerates into detection. Contract relations (as Cavell explains elsewhere) proceed from instrumental purposes for exchanges of goods, services, and terms.

60

Toward a Narrative Ethics

But narrative situations do not necessarily conform to this model; rather, they often work quite differently-to express an "acceptance of human relatedness" which requires "the acceptance of repetition." Othello cannot accept either, and thus what a "contract model" (for marriage as well as for narrative) illustrates is Othello's failure to approximate a norm for relationships not based on a contract. 51 Chambers focuses entirely on the naked instrumentality of Othello's seducing through story in Act 1, scene 1. (Contract models instrumentalize even good conduct, since one gets satisfaction and "good feeling" in exchange for doing good.) To be s'ure, Othello registers the deep enmeshment of human discourse and desire, but it also shows the mutual complicity of desire and knowledge in dampening the claims of acknowledgment. (Othello's skepticism reverberates politically, of course, but not, I would argue, in Chambers' sense of authoritarian and oppositional practice. What Levinas calls logic's alliance with politics already overcodes Othello's erotic liaisons with Venetian society, and does not, in my view, reduce to them.) Although Chambers limits his treatment of narrative situation to texts which exemplify seduction and contractual relation, he implies too narrowly that such conditions represent a norm for all narrative (and one presumes, nonnarrative) relationship. Yet in the closing paragraph of Story and Situation, Chambers unexpectedly enlarges his scope to assert that narrative "point" is indistinguishable from the "point" of human relationships-one might as well say (for humans as communicating creatures) "the point of existence" (SS, 221). The point I have been arguing thus far is that the point, if you will, at which this "point of human existence" gets called into question in fact points beyond power relations; it points to the ethical relation. If I argued against a false opposition between poetics and a hermeneutic approach to fiction in the first section of this chapter, here I have decried an undertheorized connection between the two instead. In titling this section "Formalisms: Critical and Ethical," I wanted to convey the fallout of such a mesalliance: the reductively formalist conceptualization of ethics which results when literary theory champions linguistic formalism as its regnant value. 52 In a strange reversal of the Platonic story, philosophers are shown the door in order to accommodate both poets and their critical entourage. In the rest of this chapter, I explore how certain of those philosophers-thus fuori Ie mura-have described the vexed relation between ethics and aesthetics and how (or

Toward a Narrative Ethics

61

il1deed whether) their insights might correlate with a theory of narrative ethics.

Literature and Philosophy: A Somewhat Longer Story To speak of literature and philosophy together incurs a variety of critical risks, choices, and consequences. Without being facetious, by merely reversing the order of terms as I stated them above-"philosophy and literature"-I disclose the hidden pressure of syntactic bias. So I shall proceed carefully. But first, to define my terms: "literature" signifies prose fiction, "philosophy" denotes ethics. Martha Nussbaum titles a section of her Introduction to essays on this subject, Love's Knowledge, "the ancient quarrel." One assumes this phrase must refer to the historical connection between literature and philosophy. But before its reference becomes clear, Nussbaum proceeds to detail her own dual encounters with philosophy and literature-by telling a story. She relates the institutional obstacles she faced in attempting to combine her joint interest in what were regarded as two separate sets of questions, texts, and disciplines. Her original narrative, which she now rejoins, becomes folded inside her own, as she tells a story of the deep imbrication of ethics and literature within philosophical thought in classical Greece. Thus the "ancient quarrel," it turns out, lies not between philosophy and literature but rather between "forms of discourse and views of life" (LK, 20)-both situated within a common field of inquiry, an inquiry presided over by the omnipresent discourse of ethics. But in few places outside Nussbaum's story do "literature and philosophy" now remain so linked and so safely embedded. Not only sundered from each other but disembedded from any larger narrative except historical memory, each now commonly resides in a separate discipline of its own, and each prompts a separate set of questions. Traffic between the two tends to be rare and unsatisfying. Thus similar nostalgic "stories" about ethics and literature are narrated severally by Charles Taylor, Tobin Siebers, and Wayne Booth, and their conclusions echo Nussbaum's: contemporary literary study requires an infusion of the very things it once depended on but has since expelled. (One is reminded of Wlad Godzich's point about would-be resolutions which become perturbatory.) All these authors believe that criticism functions at any time to mediate between life and

62

Toward a Narrative Ethics

art, to bridge, as Habermas puts it, the everyday world and the specialized culture of literature. 53 All concur that aesthetic judgment depends on cognitive and practical values alike. One can, of course, rebut by invoking a postmodern demurrer like Lyotard to explain how descriptive accounts such as these-stories, in fact-follow smoothly and imperceptibly from normative and prescriptive assumptions. From within the confines of moral philosophy, Bernard Williams has detailed that very process in action, insisting that the disposition to accept ethical statements does not then necessarily prove their truth. 54 Still, however, one must grant that it is possible for normativity to follow simply from a more or less accurate set of descriptions. Take Nussbaum's own Aristotelian framework, for example. Flexible and recursive, it specifies the noncommensurability of qualitatively different goods; the conflicted nature of obligations-the embedded character of our loyalties, the importance of particular persons, the intervention of the unforeseen-and the consequent need to discern differences and make judgments; and the cognitive/ethical value of emotions. Lyotard's and Williams' critiques work only if the circularity of the life/ethics/literature argument fails accurately to describe (in the geometrical sense) a relation which is in fact healthily circular. If prescription does surface in Nussbaum's account, it does so only with respect to the acuity and fullness of critical judgment, the musician's skill she calls being "richly aware and finely responsible." Nevertheless, Lyotard need not even be invoked in order to point out that the models for such perceptual discernment in Nussbaum's account-the Ververs in Henry James's The Golden Bowl-display an assured, aristocratic quality in the articulacy of their judgments which in its very taken-for-grantedness can seem remote and too easy. The Ververs seem to dispense their morals, along with their other possessions, with imperial largess. 55 Clearly, articulacy is the whole point here, since the capacity to say things in a certain juste way demarks more finely tuned judgments from those blunter and more crude. It also symbolizes the virtue of literary texts as expressions of moral problems which philosophical discourse could not render with the same subtlety. Nussbaum makes the most extensive argument for this claim. But phrases such as "getting the tone right," "obtuseness is a moral failing," and "an achievement of the precisely right description, the correct nuance of tone" (LK, 156) imply

Toward a Narrative Ethics

63

a kind of chill perfectionism, impatient with lapses not in intent, but in performance-as though one had a single chance of "getting it right" (which, admittedly, one often does-not necessarily a virtue but simply a fact of life). More often than not, ordinary persons do not share the Ververs' rich moral attunement, "the delicate communication of alert beings who stand separated by 'an exquisite tissue' through which they alertly hear each other breathing" (LK, 153). Thus the metaphor of a jazz musician which Nussbaum uses in her Introduction to describe the improvisatory quality of ethical discernment I see as possibly going in two alternative directions. In "real time" as it were, improvisatory aggrandizement can lead to simple performative tyranny-when Miles Davis walks off stage to show contempt for his fellow musicians and the audience, or when Charlie Mingus physically assaults players who do not "get the tone right," whose obtuse musicianship proves a "moral failure," one man's attunement becomes another's egoism. Or conversely, in "story time," that same gift can suggest an ethical unfinalizability, such as we see thematized in stories like James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" orJulio Cortazar's "The Pursuer." "The Pursuer," for instance (which I referred to in an earlier note), is a brilliant riff on the dissonance-cum-polyphony of aesthetic freedom in dialogue with the ethics of storytelling. In this story, however, getting the tone "right" means deadening it. How to keep/stop playing? How to keep/stop narrating? These questions involve an ethic of "articulacy" wholly different from the one Nussbaum's moral perfectionism can address. Indeed, Cortazar's story is allergic to the very idea of "perfectionism." (Nussbaum's discussions of Dickens, Proust, and Beckett do show an alternative possibility, however, one less concerned with "legislative" than with "interactive" pressures.) In the same spirit, I lay claim to my own preference for texts which exemplify "an ethics of inarticulacy"S6 or a-not-so-always "lucid bewilderment." Such texts thematize the need for a sufficiently capacious and generous narrative which forgives a broken movement toward "getting the tone right." More often than not in life, one needs the expanse of an entire life and life story to encompass the work of knowing, to develop "an ability to miss less, to be responsible to more" (LK, 189). (This is the reason perhaps that one feels about novels like Eliot's Middlemarch that they should go on and on, and not capitulate to the formal pressures of quiescence, of the "nonnarratability" of

64

Toward a Narrative Ethics

everyday life.)57 In his preface to The Golden Bowl, James says the following about life's narratability: We are condemned, in other words, whether we will it or no, to abandon and outlive, to forget and disown and hand over to desolation, many vital or social performances.... We give them up even when we wouldn't-it is not a question of choice. Not so on the other hand our really "done" things of [a] superior and more appreciable order-which leave us indeed all license of disconnexion and disavowal, but positively impose upon us no such necessity. Our relation to them is essentially traceable, and in that fact abides, we feel, the incomparable luxury of the artist. Thus do we find the desolation depicted in Anderson's "Loneliness," where narrative ethics conduces to a botched instance of aesthetic judgment, where life and art imperfecdy align. Even with the qualifications I am registering here, "imperfect alignment" probably wouldn't leap to mind as a description of the way in which my own project stands relative to Nussbaum's or the others' I list above. From the double meaning Wayne Booth, for instance, locates in ethos as betokening both character and judgment to the link Charles Taylor draws between narrative and moral space, we all seem to be proceeding in the same spirit. And yet my purpose here is precisely to distance myself from that spirit and its normative set of arguments and critical choices. To show what I mean, I want briefly to take up a point which Booth makes in The Company We Keep. He argues that the primary index of a generalizable moral consciousness is the capacity for "second-order valuings," which are discriminations about the judgments we make. He suggests that narrative fiction in particular requires an initial act of assent and surrender, asking readers "to follow story ... to accept and pursue a pattern of desires imposed by an other" (CWK, 13). He calls this Burkean view of aesthetic response "hypocrisy upwards," that is, an active rhetoric by which readers try on roles and "desire better desires" (CWK, 17). A sound, if ego-psychological approach, very similar to Charles Altieri's, Booth's still structures itself in terms of author-reader relations. Even if readers imagine stand-ins like "implied author" or "extradiegetic narratee," they still remain busy imagining ethical relations with authors. This is why for Booth reading a text can be thought of in terms of friendship; for ultimately it is the author-whether free-

Toward a Narrative Ethics

65

standing or represented by his text-who will turn out to be a better or worse friend for us. 58 But acts of assent, surrender, seduction, coercion, and bestowal all occur inside fictional texts; we must be a party to these, before we construe literary texts as messages sent from authors to readers. The "trying on of roles" within the text exactly demands our second-order reflections about those actions that we imitate as readers. In other words, we are witnesses or even interlocutors before we deflect risk and find security in the role of "readers." As Levinas says of interpersonal contact, the self is better thought of as skin rather than mind, because its relation to others precedes rational decision and choice-it is firstfelt as exposure. To read is to be vulnerable. Booth would perhaps agree, and even object that his sense of surrender implies or logically entails these discriminations. But his continuing attention to fictional rhetoric-now weighted by an ethics-shows how dedicated he is to a mostly unidirectional and static model of literary discourse: from author through text to reader. I have used Booth as an example to suggest that the philosophical deficits of narratological analysis which I noted in the last section to a degree correspond to narratological lacunae in "philosophical" criticism like Nussbaum's or Booth's. His otherwise excellent approach seems to me not to go far enough either in thinking through a certain set of concerns-knowing versus acknowledging, separateness and substitution, recognition and alterity-or in sufficiently formalizing their ramifications as narrative ethics. But why is this so?

Literature as Example Tolstoy wrote, "The activity of art is based on the fact that a man receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it.... Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by those feelings and also experience them.,,59 Tolstoy's theory of art as infection remains the most potent theory of aesthetic exemplification since Plato. If expressive kinds of art are, to use T. E. Hulme's famous phrase, so much "spilt religion," then the art which Tolstoy values most highly, by comparison, amounts to religion "transfused," so minimal is the

66

Toward a Narrative Ethics

aesthetic prophylaxis needed for self-protection; call it "unsafe art." (Indeed, improbably or not in this connection, Tolstoy's aesthetic veers quite close to Antonin Artaud's theory of art as plague.) Perhaps just as improbably, Tolstoy believed Uncle Tom's Cabin was a greater work of art than King Lear. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel actively works to generate results by example, to set into motion a chain of mimetic and performative substitutions which its readers are meant to imitate and inculcate. King Lear, conversely, as Cavell reads it, stands as a monument to distances of every kind: to the extent that it stands over against the power of exemplification, the play legislates unmediated acknowledgment. No doubt it has its lesson, invites drawing all kinds of morals (as Cavell says, "it could not happen without us"). But, as I explained in my own reading of The Rime ofthe Ancient Mariner, seeing the playas exemplary in some way misses the fact that it is meant first to be confronted: an audience stands before such a play, stands before its characters' brute separateness-not to contemplate them as "examples" but to acknowledge them as being, standing, and suffering apart. Obviously, "exemplarity" in Lear can mean the represention of a general truth, the sharing of its clarifying insights. 6o But the concept has a far more performative reach: the play installs us, so to speak, as its executors-not only its "legal witnesses," but its capital punishers. In Cavell's words, "It shows that we are responsible for the death of others even when we have not murdered them" (M"WM, 318).61 In other words, a performance of Lear places us in the presence and the present of others, while it simultaneously repudiates our own presence, insofar as the acknowledgment we owe Lear, Cordelia, Edgar, and Gloucester cannot be completed. One of the things that artworks do, then, is to send us away from them: they permit us access, but at the price of a resistance-not ours, but theirs to us. In the first two sections of this chapter, I argued that a certain resistance to texts should itself be deferred in acknowledgment, as it were, of epistemology's limits. Now I am suggesting that artworks also formally, materially chasten a too hasty temptation to extract, or to be overwhelmed by, their "moral" value. Yet most wellintentioned use made of literary texts by moral philosophers makes exactly such appropriative moves: "wresting" truth for truth's sake. The fourth epigraph to this chapter speaks of smothering persons and texts, smothering being a fate similar to the "suffocation" I find in Anderson's "Loneliness." In this regard, philosophers-even ethical

Toward a Narrative Ethics

67

philosophers-can err along with textualists and formalists. As the philosopher Richard Brudney puts it, "Even when a philosopher provides a genuine reading of a text, use of that text to defend or refute a general theory [even 'expressive idealism'] may inhibit recognition of its real philosophical interest.,,62 Construing aesthetic form in terms of ethical (practical) exemplarity as a way out of the content-as-morality bind seems to me to result in a somewhat errant notion of form, because it generalizes the power of example without paying sufficient attention to formal particulars. 63 But in "performing the text" (as I called it in Chapter 1), don't readers merely carry out the actions/messages which the text frames as examples? Doesn't "textual power" reduce ultimately to the force of the example? Only, I would answer, if one is dedicated to a strong pedagogical imperative-a bias which together unites such disparate positions as Charles Altieri's, Hillis Miller's, and Wayne Booth's. And as my reference to Tolstoy above implies, literary fiction-because it plugs into the "strong ethics" of narrative relations-"infects" better than it "teaches." And even if we want our prose fiction Brechtian rather than Artaudian, it knows that despite the clarifying Verfremdung of cigarette smoke for aesthetic distance (Brecht wanted his audience to send up its own intrusive curtain of haze), smoke still gets in your eyes. So how should philosophy "use" literature? Or rather, how should it respond to it? In his article on The Golden Bowl, Richard Brudney enumerates three options: the literary text can serve as an extended philosophical example; the literary text can be seen as a kind of moral training or, relatedly, as a proof of the practical impossibility of certain positions, moral relativism, for example; and the literary text can extend and develop a philosophical problem by placing it in a new light. This last possibility describes the philosophical intent of my book. Brudney's own analysis bears out the significance of doing so in the twin distinctions he goes on to elaborate for reading fiction like The Golden Bowl--one outside of James's text, one within it; one, a sensemaking procedure of exemplification, the other, a way in which The Golden Bowl seems to understand itself. This pair of distinctions we can see as roughly corresponding to the one I introduced above in reference to King Lear. (James's mention of "fear and pity" at the end of the novel, and Maggie's double move of hiding/aclmowledging in the Prince's arms, make the analogy with Lear, I think, uncannily apt.) The first distinction opposes evaluating an action to fashioning one;

68

rfoward a Narrative Ethics

in Brudney's terms, this is the difference between, on the one hand, circling around conduct in order to name it and, on the other, opening action up from within through ethical praxis. Whereas the first is "more like a critic's ability to appraise accurately," the second "seems analogous to an artist's ability to create" (423). In a nuanced reading of Nussbaum's reading, Brudney concludes that James's novel complements moral philosophy's work through its depiction of moral deliberation as a craft, rather than a reflection on the nature of moral rules. The discussion of ethical fashioning leads, in turn, to the second of Brudney's distinctions, which contrasts the novel's own performativity with the sort of philosophical approach that gets at literature through paraphrase and exemplification. As Brudney puts it simply, "philosophical force may sometimes reside in the words of the literary text itself" (426). (This distinction, moreover, seems analogous to me to one within Brudney's academic field, between meta-ethical theory and more experiential, embedded models like communicative ethics.) But along with a Toistoyan capacity to be moved by philosophical force-to perform its performances, as it were-one also needs the counter-gesture of textual acknowledgment, a matter of interpretive tact. And of tact, in reference to Maggie Verver's tactful silences, Brudney wisely observes: "Here, tact involves a willingness to accept 'otherness,' where this means not to seek an account of what makes the other other, to accept the sheer fact of difference.... Maintaining the surface can be a way to keep from knowing another's personal quantity or a way to express your knowledge" (433, 432). The point of this final section has been to suggest that ethically poised philosophy probably serves literature best when it opts for such tact-when it allows texts first to speak, to tell their whole stories, before it responds. Such a response needs tactfully to mediate between knowledge and silence, between bestowing a critical surplus that literature cannot provide itself and simply registering the fact of literature's alterity, its repudiation of categories which attempt to appropriate and "theorize" it-at its best, an equilibrium of call and response, not blindness and insight. In this also, ethical theory keeps company with literary theory. In the readings which follow, I will be adapting the thought of Stanley Cavell, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Emmanuel Levinas in order to apply their insights about the claims of intersubjectivity to my own theory of narrative ethics. It seems to me methodologically sounder to

Toward a Narrative Ethics

69

unfold those insights alongside the details of the texts for which they are relevant, rather than to indulge in any more propaedeutics. In terms of "unfolding," however, it needs to be made clear what this book does and does not do. It does not systematically "read" Bakhtin's, Cavell's, or Levinas' philosophical projects. Rather, it applies Levinasian, Cavellian, and Bakhtinian themes to literary texts. In doing so, it tries to exercise the same caution about "instrumentalizing" philosophy that it argued for in literature's behalf; it does not wish to bend the content of ideas to the whims of critical bricolage. I appeal to the recurrent analogies each writer makes to literary examples (many, in Levinas, case, drawn from prose fiction) as something of a sanction for the engagements I rehearse here. 1 appeal also to Levinas' implications for his own writing when he says, "Labor remains economic; it comes from the home and returns to it, a movement of Odyssey where the adventure pursued in the world is but the accident of a return.... Works have a destiny independent of the I, are integrated in an ensemble of works" (TI, 176). Fittingly, the literalY image Levinas uses to underscore that idea-Abraham's movement away from home in contrast to Odysseus' circular return-is drawn from narrative-sacred narrative. Of the three, Levinas, one must say, poses the same hard challenge to/for literary theory that he does with respect to philosophy. More than even philosophical tact is at stake here, since Levinas' philosophy questions not the quality of one's critical assumptions, but rather the right even to hold them-the conatus essendi, as he would say, the "I can" of discursive autonomy. In this way, Levinas, ethical project seeks even from itself a critical accounting, its own answerability. In the critical duties it owes to text and to interpretation, literary theory, as Levinas says of Judaism, practices a difficult freedom. And that is why it requires interruption, a Saying distinct from the Said. In the chapters which follow, the texts I discuss know such necessity beforehand; to recall my epigraph from J abes, together, they tie a knot of correspondences which unties the act of reading within its ties.

3 We Die in a Last Word: Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

[A dream:] This is my sister here, with some identifiable friends and many other people. They are all listening to me and it is this very story that I am telling: the whistle of three notes, the hard bed, the neighbor whom I would like to move, but whom I am afraid to wake as he is stronger than me. I also speak diffusely of our hunger and of the lice-control, and of the Kapo who hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash myself as I was bleeding. It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent; they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was not there. My sister looks at me, gets up, and goes away without a word.... My dream stands in front of me, still warm, and although awake I am still full of its anguish: and then I remember that it is not a haphazard dream, but that I dreamed it not once but many times since I arrived here, with hardly any variations of environment or details. I am now quite awake and I remember that I have recounted it to Alberto and that he confided to me, to my amazement, that it is also his dream and the dream of many others, perhaps of everyone. Why does it happen? Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story? Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

71

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last wordthe last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

We die in a last word. Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions

I

I focus on two novels written within fifteen years of each other. "Mariner texts" we can call them in a number of important respects, Lord Jim and Winesburg, Ohio together chart a course which modernist fiction was to navigate from both sides of the Atlantic. Antirealist for different reasons, both texts turn inward to explore the constitutive features of storytelling itself and the iconic relationship between the novel and the everyday narrating of lives. Speaking anthropologically (each novel does have the effect of "spying on" its chosen alien world), one could say that Jim, Marlow, and their interlocutors inhabit the same Coleridgean space of storytelling ritual and role as George Willard and the landlocked Ancients of Winesburg. Conrad's ambivalence about cultural or national loyalties, on the one hand, and Anderson's sense of artistic singularity, on the other, inform their novels' obsession with exile and solitude, with identity and culture at the fin de siecle. Both texts explore a problematics of narration in extreme circumstances, the loneliness of long- and short-distance narrators alike. Each novel, finally, could be described as a narrative of moments: Jim's intermittent leaps into individuation and story in Conrad's tale, the bursts and flashes of narrative self-revelation which both disclose and produce grotesque identity in Anderson's stories. In Chapter 1, I used the phrase "caught by language" to suggest how the mechanics of narrative discourse in a fundamental sense already implies an ethics; I reinvoke it here, not only because it provides a convenient point of contact between Conrad's and Anderson's texts, but also to show why I think they serve as paradigms for narrative ethics. In chapter 20 of Lord Jim, after recounting the story of capturing a rare specimen, and just prior to Marlow's story about his own such specimen-Jim-old man Stein quotes from Faust: "So halt' ich's endlich denn in meinem Randen / Dnd nenn' es in gewissem Sinne mein" ("For when I hold it finally in my hands, I take it in a certain N THIS CHAPTER

73

74

We Die in a Last Word

sense as mine").! The quotation's literariness-not least its being left in German-perhaps draws readers back to the epigraph from N ovalis which begins the novel, "It is certain my conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe it." The one epigraph seems to fulfill, even answer the other. For Marlow within the text, however, the Faust quotation stands for the hermeneutic challenge that Jim poses for him, and that Marlow's story poses in turn for its interlocutors. The "grasping" calls to mind not onlyJim's need for recognition (his telling as a means for counting, as Stanley Cavell might say), but Marlow's reciprocal desire to capture Jim and his story by more than just a "glimpse through a rent in the mist" (11: 100). And it also implies the complicity of the listeners in such a capture, their arrogation of its meaning. "Frankly," as Marlow pauses to say to them, "it is not my words that I distrust but your minds" (21: 172). At the same time, it should give these listeners pause, by forcing awareness of the evaluative process required to sort through just these multiple valences which collect around the idea of "capture." This almost incidental scene from Lord Jim strikes a subtle rhythm between apprehension and comprehension. Although Stein refers to his experience as a purely individual epiphany, we can read it intersubjectively as a certain pulse of narrative language: in the act of narrating, storytellers lay their hands on those they address, possibly to minister to them, possibly to do them violence (if only verbal). And those addressed, in the ways they construe or respond, perform answering actions in tum. (Hence the luxury of deontological judgment, which eschews such "close contact," a vantage point occupied in the novel by its designated narratee, the recipient of Marlow's written notes. An unnamed moralist who comes by his familiarity with "ethical progress" wholly untested"cleverly, without singeing [his] wings" (36:255)-this reader simply pronounces judgment; his task is merely juridical: to fit case to generalization like the officers at Jim's inquest.) Stein, evidently, finds consolation in the temporary, ineffable quality of his illumination. In gewissem Sinne ("in a certain sense") can be taken as the positive counterpart to de Man's "not necessarily" in his argument that hermeneutic understanding in life and in literature are "not necessarily compatible." Stein seems to suggest that the conditionality life and art share-the pathos of encounter-is what unifies ethical and aesthetic response, binding reference to phenomenalism. The lines

Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

75

from Goethe-as an image for narration-describe a swaying between reference and phenomenalism, perception and possession, which grounds the novel throughout. How might this be seen as an ethical moment in the text? Stein speaks of catching sight of the butterfly while "looking over" one of the men he has just shot: "And as I looked at his face for some sign of life I observed something like a faint shadow pass over his forehead" (20: 160). Forcing a strict imagistic logic, we can correlate this small incident with the fact that all the while Stein relates it, he meaningfully directs his attention toward or away from Marlow-he "withdrew his eyes from my face ... looked again at me significantly ... his thoughtful placid face twitched once" (161). I want to call attention here to the important role assigned to the human face, how it functions from one scene to the next as both cipher and decoder, text and commentary, object and means of recognition, a presence behind shadows or clouds and the force that shines through them. This image, too, pervades the text; to a great degree, face, or its metonym, vision, forms the topic of Lord Jim. Stein, for example, senses an affinity between himself and Jim, the "visionary" or dreamy sensibility they both share-"To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream" (164). But vision more typically functions in the text (as it does in the scene above) as the material sense itself-"seeing" as reading or interpreting or recognizing (accurately or not), "sight" as something to be focused or narrowed or viewed against a background. Ethically speaking, the directed quality of vision, the fact that sight takes hold of and commands the objects it views or selects out, makes it estrange what it thereby domesticates. We correct for this "ethos of alienation"2 latent in any act of seeing only by acknowledging the special character and demands of intersubjective encounter-when faces look out onto other faces which return their gaze. As Levinas puts it, "Vision moves into grasp. Vision opens upon a perspective, upon a horizon, and describes a traversable distance, invites the hand to movement and to contact, and ensures them.... [Light] makes possible the signification of objects that border one another. It does not enable one to approach them face to face" (TI, 191). But obviously, "face" also means speech. And as "speech cuts across vision" according to Levinas, just so optics and dialogue, impression and expression, will clash in Lord Jim as competing modes of encounter. But more important for my

76

We Die in a Last Word

analysis of this scene, the first word of expression that Levinas ascribes to the face-its transcendental signification before any words are even spoken-is, "You shall not kill!" Such a command contests the murderous reduction and assimilation that looking tacidy promises-the violence that, as Levinas says, "aims only at a face." The force of Stein's anecdote, then, and of its staging in the text (innocuous as they may seem), is just this theme of force and perceptual aggrandizement. Stein catches sight of the butterfly, holds it in his hand and "takes" it as his own, and at the same time surveys the face of the man he has just killed. What is the shadow he sees? And why does he look at Marlow while narrating this? And how does Marlow look in turn, we should ask ourselves, when he retells this same story to his audience? Thus begins a chain of contaminated looking which at every point enjoins an ethical complicity-if, that is, listeners "grasp," or mediate-the significance of their very grasping, their comprehension. In his preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Conrad famously and paradoxically remarks, "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see." Over and above the complex synesthesia at play here, Conrad yokes together art and authorial power and plainly specifies their connection: he makes readers aware of the force behind aesthetic perception. Extending Conrad's observation, we can say that narrative relations depend in part on a kind of perceptual violence: on the producing end, for good or for ill, force ("to make you see"), and on the receiving end, denied or not, recognition ("Yes, I see" or "No, I do not see"). As vision appropriates, so language fixes and holds fast, narrative discourse doing so in its own distinctive ways. Sherwood Anderson explores this identical dilemma of catching and being caught in language in Winesburg, Ohio. In a short piece not included in the novel, he addresses directly the peculiar symbiosis which Conrad locates between representation and narration, between seeing and saying, transforming a hermeneutic dilemma into an ethical one. Did you ever have a notion of this kind-there is an orange, sayan apple, lying on the table before you. You put out your hand to take it. Perhaps you eat it, make it a part of your physical life. Have you touched? Have you eaten? That's what I wonder about. The whole

Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

77

subject's important to me because I want the apple.... For a long time I thought only of eating the apple. Then later its fragrance became something of importance too. The fragrance stole out through my room, through a window and into the streets.... The point is that after the form of the apple began to take my eye I often found myself unable to touch at all. My hands went toward the object of my desire and then came back. There I sat, in the room with the apple before me, and hours passed. I had pushed myself off into a world where nothing has any existence. Had I done that, or had I merely stepped, for the moment, out of the world of darkness into the light? It may be that my eyes are blind and that I cannot see. It may be I am deaf. My hands are nervous and tremble. How much do they tremble? Now, alas, I am absorbed in looking at my own hands. With these nervous and uncertain hands may I really feel for the form of things concealed in the darkness? ("The Form of Things Concealed")3

In addition to the coincidence of the light/dark imagery which forms so much of the symbolic background for Lord Jim, Anderson's and Conrad's texts correspond in more interesting ways. But Anderson's narrator refracts Stein's insight through a harsher and perhaps more distorting prism. His story traces a minor nightmare of defamiliarization, beginning in a desire like Stein's to possess what it perceives, and ending in a grasping as lillsure of its own power as of that no longer visible thing for which it continues to reach. Most frightening of all is the state of arrest it describes: perceiving subject suddenly finds himself in bondage to the object of his gaze, his predicament suddenly that of perceiving subject as perceived object. The eye sees, the hands reach, the eyes become riveted to the sight of trembling hands, the hands falter. Again, like Stein's anecdote, Anderson's implies a purely personal and perceptual dilemma, the tension between aesthetic vision and selfconsciousness; Anderson's narrator shares with Lord Jim's Captain Brierly the dangerous interpretive flaw of autonomic empathy. Similarly, the passage's final question works much like Brierly's abandoned chronometer, found on the rail off which he has jumped to his death-a riddle which lacks an answer. "With these nervous and uncertain hands may I really feel ...?" What does it mean? Which of two linguistic possibilities-a rhetorical question or a real question-does it imply? Does the chain of unsettled points of reference terminate with uncer-

78

We Die in a Last Word

tain hands feeling around in the darkness? Or, as a sequence of narrated events, each more attenuated than the one before, does it thereby implicate readers by drawing them inside its own circle? The last "event," in the form of a question, seems to solicit a possible response. Are readers thus being solicited? Does an aesthetic problem shade into an ethical problematic when it invites readers to participate in its solution? If so, then the function of this final question would roughly parallel that of the contrapuntal theatrical gestures-lowered voice, twitching face, match struck, match blown out-which Conrad assigns to Stein as he talks to Marlow. (This sort of imagery-contracting listeners to individually sensate body parts-accompanies a variety of conversational encounters in Lord Jim, and draws attention, I would argue, to our presence as real, though silent, eavesdroppers.) Each of these small prose poems of recognition, of encounter narrates an allegory of perception and recognition-the perceptual and epistemological issues at work on the broadest level in Conrad's and Anderson's texts. These become ethical issues, however, when perception folds into narration and subject/object relations become intersubjective. The excerpt from Lord Jim shows how complexly hermeneutic, representational, and narrational ethics intersect. While Conrad may intend this scene to be read simply as a sign of Marlow and Stein's sententiousness-a trite dose of "moralism"-I think it demands a wider field of vision: indeed, by encompassing Stein's and Marlow's own visual and discursive fields, readers "take into" their own-assimilate and become responsible for-the acts of seeing and narrating which they read. The Anderson passage likewise traces a nexus of ethical responsibilities. A subtle piece of mimesis, it lands, like the story called "Loneliness," in readers' hands-but without the benefit of Marlovian interposition. It designates readers as active witnesses, "author-creators," as Bakhtin would say, and not simply "author-perceivers." Each text sets before the reader an ethical structure simultaneously descriptive and performative. Each suggests a model for interpretive response: in Conrad, perception which becomes a state of possessing or "catching" and, in Anderson, perception as a state of being possessed or "being caught." Each employs confessional narrative, as do Lord Jim and Winesburg, Ohio as a whole. Each text, finally, analogizes aesthetic

Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

79

looking and human relation, showing the close relation between aesthetic perception and an ethics of Saying and Said. "How the other looks from my position," in Bakhtin's phrase (AA, 124), is the larger dilemma-a transitive as well as intransitive taskwhich Lord Jim and Winesburg, Ohio both examine. How to convert perception into language through consummating acts of "live-entering" (Bakhtin's coinage) is the novels' common inquiry-in short, how to "author": "In this sense, one can speak of the absolute aesthetic need of one person for another, for the seeing, remembering, gathering, and unifying activity of the other" (AA, 98). Anderson confines his explorations to the shortest of modern narrative forms by mirroring in its brevity the shrinkage of narrators' lives to the moments they get to narrate their stories. His narrators, however, lack the luxury of Marlow's expansive and well-honed performative expertise, and readers accordingly must evaluate and respond within the foreshortened space of one-time disclosures of self. If Lord Jim encloses face-to-face encounter within the processual dynamics of interpretation, Winesburg makes it contingent on jagged and obsessive bursts of speech. Since Anderson generously minimizes any hermeneutic uncertainty about his stories' "meaning," the ethical drama unfolds almost exclusively on this narrational plane-the plane of use, the atavistic manner in which stories get told and the calculated or incalculable effects they have on listeners. It is in Lord Jim, however, that we find a definitive illustration of hermeneutic ethics, that set of exegetical demands which the text models and propels outward toward readers. The formulaic genre of "adventure yarn" gives way to a complex web of narrative relations, of dialogic weave and counterweave. The temporal dislocations which result, at the most fundamental level of mythos, of narrative energia, suggest nothing less than the lure as well as the threat of the "last word," the Penelope's shroud of stories' endings as well as the Odyssean scar of their beginnings. That is, in part, what Marlow intimates when he asks the question I quote as an epigraph to this chapter-"Are not our lives too short for that full utterance," that is, a finished story? But such narrative desire ineluctably shades into, is overtaken by, what Levinas calls "metaphysical desire": the reaching out and liberating of an other, while exposing and making answerable the self.

80

We Die in a Last Word

Lord Jim Living Aesthetically

Lord Jim installs a critique of perception even before its story actually commences. Conrad's prefatory "author's note," a corrective to some common misconceptions about the novel when it was first published, paraphrases it as "the acute consciousness of lost honour." The note records a glimpse ofJim in passing and the instant and profound effect he has on Conrad's narrative imagination, and ends with a preliminary statement of the novel's grand fugal theme: "One sunny morning in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw Uim's] form pass by-'appealing-significant-under a cloud-perfectly silent.' Which is as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was 'one of us'" (8). "Form" joined to a series of empty descriptions, sensuous perception linked to a discontinuous process of making sense, sympathy folded into the challenge of expression-these represent the set of "problems" which the novel explores as a whole. The novel's first chapter, however, starts with Jim positioned in space before readers; not merely does he advance, but with "dogged selfassertion" he "advances straight at you" (1 :9). Conrad positions him according to height as well, describing him as falling just short of heroic stature-"an inch, perhaps two, under six feet." Attitude and altitude, one could say, combine throughout this text to select Jim out, forcing him on readers' attention as an object of scrutiny arrayed against a changing set of backgrounds. Lord Jim tells of perceptual possibilityof angle and depth of focus, of looks, gazes, glances, and contemplations. But as a simultaneous critique of such a possibility, the novel subjects this same scrutiny to one of its own, as readers ofJim are, so to speak, "caught looking." In this way, perceptual judgment becomes deliberative and acquires moral force. The novel counterbalances Jim's deliberateness, however, with an equivalent propensity for immobilization; his will is held in suspension, his senses are oddly detached: "He stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled around. . . . A push made him stagger. . . . A yelling voice reached him faintly ... Jim felt his shoulder gripped firmly" (1:12). Of his most famous lapse, his non-Kierkegaardian leap, which Marlow not unfairly calls "his abstention," Jim explains, "I jumped ... it seems.... 1 knew nothing about it till I looked up" (9:88). Linguistic deautomiz-

Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

81

ing exposes cognitive automatization. (The ideational gaps even echo the orthographic spacing of adjectives in Conrad's prefatory note.) This self-forgetfulness contrasts sharply with Jim's "original position" of dogged self-assertion, and yet it reveals a similar animal simplicity; it is not surprising, then, that Jim's reflex when Ineeting Marlow is to force an imagined association between himself and a dog. At moments like these, perception becomes merely sensory, unthinking, a possibility always available in the novel even under the social pressures of dialogue or face-to-face encounter; from the inquest at the novel's beginning to readers' awareness of their own silent and continual staring at the fates of others, Lord Jim places empty seeing on trial. As in Coleridge, such gazing involves a fateful narrative peril when faces interlock; one speaks, the other keeps silent, the narcosis of Saying is reflected in a listener's glazed eyes as well as in those which "glitter." Jim falls under such a spell even after he has reclaimed the chance for heroism he had previously "missed," when facing and fatefully misrecognizing Gentleman Brown: "Have we met," says Brown, "to tell each other the story of our lives?" (41:288). To me the conversation of these two across the creek appears now as the deadliest kind of duel on which Fate looked on with her cold-eyed knowledge of the end. . . . At last Brown threw himself down full length and watched Jim out of the corners of his eyes. Jim on his side of the creek stood thinking and switching his leg. The houses in view were silent, as if a pestilence had swept them clean of every breath of life; but many invisible eyes were turned, from within, upon the two men with the creek between them. (42:291)

Here all actors, including Fate, become spectators, and all action reduces to accuracy of perception: cold-eyed, wide-eyed, or snake-eyed. Where Gentleman Brown's sight employs dead-on empirical reduction, Jim's aims at a reduction in the "transcendental," most phenomenologically benighted, sense. Indeed, Conrad renders Jim's perceptual attitude in the novel's first four chapter with almost Husserlian evocativeness. But rather than distill consciousness to some eidetic substrate, Jim brackets the contents of ordinary reality so as to let himself dream. "The hazy splendour of the sea in the distance, and the hope of a stirring life in adventure" (1: 11), "these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements" (3 :21), together make up the preeminently movable horizon for Jim's

82

We Die in a Last Word

defect of consciousness. ''Jim on the bridge was penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded safety and peace that could be read on the silent aspect of nature like the certitude of fostering love upon the placid tenderness of a mother's face" (3: 19). But read by whom? By Jim or by anyone? At first, one might take it to be a generalized description. As such-consciousness screened away from its ego, and against a background of the everyday-it does rather closely approximate Edmund Husserl's description of "the natural standpoint" in Ideas: I am aware of a world, spread out in space endlessly, and in time becoming and become, without end. I am aware of it, that means, first of all, I discover it immediately, intuitively, I experience it. What is

actually perceived, and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate (to some extent at least), is partly pervaded, partly girt about with a dimly apprehended depth or fringe of indeterminate reality ... an empty mist of determinacy gets studded over with intuitive possibilities or presumptions, and only the "form" of the world as "world" is foretokened. Moreover, the zone of indeterminacy is infinite. The misty horizon that can never be completely outlined remains necessarily there. 4

In Jim's case, however, a horizon of mist circumscribes his entire perceptual apparatus. (A similar outline frames him in the eyes of others, particularly Marlow.) It limns his own natural standpoint, blanking the horizon which lies "out there." But as his subsequent encounter with Gentleman Brown shows, Jim's "exquisite sensibility" involves more than mere dreaming; it derives from projective egoism and a fatally sympathetic imagination: an "imaginative beggar," Marlow aptly calls him (7:68). We see this ironic contrast immediately: on the one hand, dreams of being "always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book," and on the other-a mere four lines later-paralysis in the face of imminent danger ("he stood still-as if confounded") (1: 11). Bakhtin calls this sort of cataleptic narcissism "living aesthetically," a defective form of self-forgetfulness whose only "surplus," paradoxically, consists in self-inflation. "It is really only other people living and not me, a lovingly perceptualized past life of other people . . . I will not find myself in that life, but only my double pretender . . . a hollow fictitious product that clouds the optical purity of being. ... a soul

Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

83

without a place ofits own is created, a participant without a name and without a role-something absolutely extrahistoricaf' (M, 32; my emphasis).

Here, Bakhtin critiques not the aesthetic attitude, but only its misapplication to oneself. Through a refusal of boundedness, of a point d'appui outside subjectivity from which to pierce the mists of interior sortilege and rectify its weak assimilation to surrounding others, one commits "optical forgery." Indeed, as Marlow later realizes, Stein's famous defense of that attitude-"the way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea hold you up" (20: 163)-can be no more reliably depended on than can Jim's own clouded visions. Narrating Reliably Jim's dreaminess represents but the first of several faulty models of reading which the text assembles for our study. The most important of these in the first four chapters belongs not to Jim, however, but to the narrator himself. IfJim rails at the weather's unfairness at "taking him unaware," but becomes tractable in the face of its mildness-"then fine weather returned, and he thought no more about it" (2:15)-the narrator plays the identical game of pathetic fallacy. He describes the sunshine as having "killed all thought, oppressed the heart," and the ship "as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity" (1: 19). The last sentence of the chapter-"The nights descended on her like a benediction"-commences a riot of simile in the chapter which follows: "The new moon ... was like a slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold . . . the propeller turned without a check, as though its beat had been part of the scheme of a safe universe.... Jim paced athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence were loud to his own ears, as if echoed by the watchful stars" (3:20-21). Does Jim hear this "echo" or does the narrator? Compare Marlow at his most deflationary: "The sea hissed 'like twenty thousand kettles.' That's his simile, not mine" (10:89). Despite Conrad's penchant for "supernatural naturalism," here, where one would expect the narrator's point of view to offset Jim's romanticism unequivocally, it actually seems to endorse it through similar impressionistic excess. 5 In fact, having rather slyly mocked Jim up to this point, the narrator gradually negates that critical distance, and surrenders to his own imaginative projection.

84

We Die in a Last Word

The virtuoso moment of convergence appears just before the Patna:r convergence with its unidentified "hurt": the undersea collision which damages but does not scuttle the ship. As Jim glances at the navigation chart, he translates symbol seamlessly into referent. The chart's surface becomes the ocean, the pencil line, the path of the pilgrims' souls, and the pencil, "a naked ship's spar floating in the pool of a sheltered dock" (3 :21). Luxuriating in his natural standpoint, Jim discovers again in dreaming his life's "secret truth, its hidden reality"; when he comes to, glancing now at the ocean's surface, he sees "the white streak of the wake drawn as straight by the ship's keel upon the sea as the black line drawn by the pencil upon the chart" (3:22). Tenor and vehicle have imperceptibly changed places. But a more interesting problem suggests itself: to what to ascribe the relativity and instability of description? The implied free indirect style only underscores the collusion here between the narrator and Jim. In a novel which places such a premium on narratorial trust, Conrad seems intentionally to exploit the affinity between a traditional form of literary empathy through images and Jim's distinctive brand of "living aesthetically," in order to pose just this question about the moral sense which resides within subjective impression. The immediate discursive transition to the inquest and the swiftness with which the narrator describes its proceedings in chapter 4 suggests that systematized models of interpretation and judgment cannot sufficiently tackle such a question. Conventional morality, "as instructive as the tapping with a hammer on an iron box" (5 :48), does not possess the imagination needed to contextualize mere fact. In describing Jim's trial for abandoning ship, the narrator again links imaginative subtlety to optics, but this time in terms of dearth rather than excess: "the audience seemed composed of staring shadows. They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!" (4:27). The narrator exposes the thinness of legal concepts of "fact" and the bankruptcy of public, judicial discourse when one needs to fathom what Bakhtin calls "the man in man." The question of his probity still pending, however, the narrator nevertheless makes it clear that the story needs to be told in a different way; indeed, it needs to be told as a story-orally. Hence the tie between sight and mesmeric narration: "from below nlany eyes were looking out at Dim] out of dark faces, out of red faces, out of faces attentive, spellbound, as if all these people

Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

85

sitting in orderly rows upon narrow benches had been enslaved by the fascination of his voice. It was very loud, it rang startling in his own ears, it was the only sound in the world" (4:27). Certainly, legal ethics involves a form of narrative ethics, since defense, prosecution, and judgment all depend on ordinary acts of narration and witnessing. Contrariwise, extortional motives and a covert imperialism of question and answer may just as easily lie behind simple storytelling, as they may influence the trying of legal cases in court. As Stanley Cavell has aptly observed, narratives in both the first and the third person can withhold more than they divulge. 6 Having thus exhibited both the defects of a restricted notion of testimony and the unreliability of two kinds of unrestricted fictionalizing-Jim's first-person fantasizing and the original narrator's third-person arabesques-Conrad now turns to face-to-face models of narrative encounter for the duration of the novel. Vzhivanie; or Live-Entering

The novel now encloses second-order hermeneutic consultations within the enframing structure of the "yam." With the interpretive dependability of one narrator in doubt, readers are, as it were, passed along with Jim to another; the story requires a storyteller, and the novel must now masquerade as spoken language. Marlow descants before a group of "staring shadows." Jim's desires for language-"he had come round to the view that only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appalling face of things" (4:29)have proved over-optimistic: "the sound of his own truthful statements confirmed his deliberate opinion that speech was of no use to him any longer" (4:31). Marlow must therefore act as Jim's father-confessor. But he bears the additional burden of having to transmit Jim's laying down of his own burden through the laminae of vzhivanie, "or live-entering," to use Bakhtin's term; since Marlow must "consummate" Jim's suffering through language, live-entering must now acquire a live voice. Though perhaps closest in literal meaning to "incarnation", vzhivanie translates for practical purposes as "live-entering," and means, simply, a mode of active engagement with the other which mediates between identification or empathy on the one hand, and objective respect at a distance on the other. I must put myself in another's place

86

We Die in a Last Word

and "fill in" his horizon with the surplus of perspective outside him. An aesthetic as well as an ethical act, vzhivanie represents the sort of transferable property between the hermeneutics of reading and of experience that poses most immediately the issue of what de Man calls their "compatability." A suffering person, for instance, in Bakhtin's evocative description, "does not see the agonizing tension of his own muscles, does not see the entire, plastically consummated posture of his own body or the expression of suffering on his own face. He does not see the clear blue sky against the background of which his suffering outward image is delineated for me.... I must put myself in his place and then, after returning to my own place, 'fill in' his horizon through that excess of seeing which opens out from this, my own, place outside him" (AA, 25). But I must also "return to myself" after such projective forays, and refer what I have experienced back to the other. (Contrast this delimiting of boundaries with a romantic elision-indeed, a doffing of them-like Walt Whitman's: "Agonies are one of my changes of garments.1I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself became the wounded person.") The double sense of "return" which follows this lending out of understanding and identity to others is "an obligatory condition," in Bakhtin's words. It functions precisely as what enables any hermeneutic endeavor, since it avoids the disabling and obstructive threat of "infection" by texts as well as by persons. (In his theory of otherness, one must say, however, Bakhtin is more concerned with preserving subjectivity than exposing it, as Levinas would prefer; "consummation" is thus the other side of what Levinas calls another's "infinition" in and through me.) To return to the text, Marlow's perception ofJim, like the narrator's and Jim's own, remains far from unobstructed, and thus does not necessarily supply the most unalloyed "excess of seeing." Jim-his real name never disclosed-always appears against a background of indeterminacy, of Husserlian mist: "To watch his face was like watching a darkening sky before a clap of thunder, shade upon shade imperceptibly coming on" (6:59). "Face," in Levinas' sense of immediate revelation, merely mystifies here, being the external correlate to Jim's oneiric self-reading. Deciphering a human face, a hallmark of Marlow's encounters with Jim, becomes simply another kind of occluded interpretation, as the novel now starts placing the greatest pressure on narrative revelation.

Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

87

Mediation; or Dialectical Speech "Eyes seeking the response of eyes / Bring out the stars, bring out the flowers" is how Robert Frost describes one happy consequence of unmediated vision in the fittingly titled poem "All Revelation." But the kind of productive opposition needed in Lord Jim is vocal-"original response," in a phrase from another poem by Frost. Conrad stresses both its necessity and its difficulty by stringing a set of face-to-face encounters across a spectrum at whose middle sits Marlow's ongoing dialogue with Jim. All these encounters-with Stein, Jones, the French Captain, Brierly, and Jim himself-are flawed in one way or another, not simply because each necessarily amounts to partial testimony, but rather because each ethically misfires. The two bedridden figures-the hospitalized mate at the story's beginning and Gentleman Brown at its end-thus form a kind of frame around this collective narrative infirmity. The former, while prey to his "batrachian" delirium, exclaims, "I tell you there are no such eyes as mine this side of the Persian Gulf" (5:45). At the same time, however, he dehumanizes the Patna's pilgrims by hallucinating them as so many pink toads; he eventually lapses into "an interminable and sustained howl." Gentleman Brown comes off similarly. After he relates his own optical seizing ofJim, "I could see directly I set my eyes on him what sort of fool he was" (37:25), Marlow describes him as having "said all these things in profound gasps, staring at me with his yellow eyes out of a long, ravaged brown face." We can, then, take Marlow's earlier remark-"1 am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impression" (42)-as a sort of cautionary note about such "invalid" vantage points, and the extra pressure consequently needed to translate between different orders of communication. "Invalid," in short, cuts two ways: "ill" and "null." In the cases of Brown and the mate, discourse and vision degenerate, or else cancel each other out, in particularly crude instances of a general malady afflicting the entire text. Thus discursive mettle as well as perceptual judgment lies under a cloud in this text. And therefore Jim-the focus for both-needs to be "cleared" in more senses than one. The failure of judicial procedures early in the novel merely confirms (if negatively) how deeply speech and vision become matters ofjustice, in this case a capacity to delineate boundaries-to outline, to frame, to discern, to "interrupt," in an

88

We Die in a Last Word

ethical sense. And marking boundaries between persons-discursively and perceptually-is a fundamental principle, this text tells us, of narrative ethics. 7 Levinas describes two ways in which intersubjective boundaries become obscured: by knowledge as object-cognition and by vision stricto sensu. Both reduce to conditions of disclosure rather than to expression or revelation, vision being a means of adequating another, and knowledge a means of enclosing him or her within a "theme." Together, these two orientations exercise a kind of sorcery, screening as through mist, disclosing "as if by burglary." "Absolute experience is not disclosure; to disclose, on the basis of a subjective horizon, is already to miss the noumenon. The interlocutor alone is the term of pure experience, where the Other enters into relation ... where he expresses himself without our having to disclose him from a 'point ofview,' in a borrowed light" (TI, 67). Marlow himself captures some of the spellbinding quality of mediated encounter when he invokes the figure of the moon, a defining image for Patusan and for "haunted" persons and their converse: "it is to our sunshine, which-say what you like-is all we have to live by, what the echo is to the sound: misleading and confusing whether the note be mocking or sad. It robs all forms of matter-which, after all, is our domain--of their substance, and gives a sinister reality to shadows alone" (24:187). "Discourse," by contrast, "is rupture and commencement-prose" (TI, 203) (very like Bakhtin's notion of unfinalizabili ty).

A relation between terms that resist totalization, that absolve themselves from the relation or that specify it, is only possible as language. The resistance of one term to the other is not due to the obscure and hostile residue of alterity, but, on the contrary, to the inexhaustible surplus of attention which speech, ever teaching, brings me. For speech is always a taking up again of what was a simple sign cast forth by it, an ever renewed promise to clarify what was obscure in the utterance. (TI, 97) Each time Marlow retells Jim's story, each time he threads it through its various approximations, he renews that promise narratively. Thus Marlow freely acknowledges that it is his narration which has disclosed Jim to us, Jim's story bookended by Marlow's repeated tellings of it: "He existed for me, and after all it is only through me

Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

89

that he exists for you. I've led him out by the hand and paraded him before you" (21:171). Aside from the paternalistic tone such a statement conveys (a consistent feature of Marlow's friendship with Jim), we may detect an almost punitive quality. Being paraded means being caught and exhibited, like Stein's specimens or Jim at the mercy of the inquest's legal machinery. But spectacle enjoins accountability. Thus in leading Jim out before his interlocutors, Marlow implicates them not in a complicity of mere watching, but in a certain custodial function; his listeners now become "keepers" of Jim's story. Though Marlow expresses distrust at the intradiegetic level-"Frankly, it is not my words I mistrust but your minds" (172)-even so, he extends stewardship outward, where it passes into critical scrutiny: "You may be able to tell better, since the proverb has it that the onlookers see most of the game" (171). Marlow's admissions, like other models of reading in the novel, attest to the dialectic of expression and disclosure which becomes Conrad's special concern in Lord Jim. The primacy of ethical principles in Levinas forbids any such dialectic. In turn, it demands an absolutism that Conrad's impressionism simply cannot afford. Levinas speaks of the Other as one whose presence dispels the anarchic sorcery of facts, as someone "who has broken through the screen of phenomena and has associated me with himself" (T1, 99). In Lord Jim, however, while Jim and Marlow join each other in reciprocal contemplation, screens and mists prevail between them as two of the novel's regnant values. Indeed, personality is itself already screened; experience, as Conrad's contemporary Walter Pater phrased it, is "ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without." But if speech does in fact "cut across" vision, as Levinas insists, then Marlow nevertheless speaks for a certain collusion between tongue and eye-the naked appeal persons make alongside their often thwarted speech: "'I am here-still here' ... and what more can the eye of the most forsaken of human beings say?" (12: 106). Precisely because it is literature and not ethical philosophy, a represented reality rather than actual or "absolute" experience, Lord Jim can only work in terms of successive mediations, partial disclosures, syncretisms of vision and expression, always on the way perhaps to an irreducible face to face. s Mediation, in this sense, is the novel's very topic, in theme and in structure: "the expectation of some essential

90

We Die in a Last Word

disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror, of human emotions" (6:48). But as the novel's premise seems also to rest on Jim's ultimate unfathomability or, rather, on the ceaselessness of the interpretation he invites, we still need to weigh the merits of Marlow's method and motive. If perhaps not fully "Levinasian," they do, I believe, remain ethically sound within the novel's own impressionistic categories, a matter of shadows as well as light: "Perhaps this is the real cause of my interest in his fate. I don't know whether it was exactly fair to him to remember the incident which had given a new direction to his life, but at that very moment I remembered very distinctly. It was like a shadow in the light" (27:201).

Disclosure; or Solipsistic Speech But what of the novel's other readers and storytellers? Captain Brierly, for example, stands (or more accurately, falls) as a monument to projective identification. He is a very poor reader of Conrad's Jim. Or, as the mate puts it, "We never know what a man is made of" (6:50). What we may thus take for the nihilistic heart of the novel casts a painfully ironic light on Brierly's brand of empathy, its solipsism and self-regard. To his onlookers, Brierly seems to possess "a surface as hard as granite" (6:49). But Marlow comes to realize otherwise: "he was probably holding silent inquiry into his own case" (6:49). Besides dogs and doggedness, Brierly and Jim share a good deal in common; each recapitulates the other's narcissistic excess, each prefers mirrored reflection to "the seeing, remembering, gathering, and unifying activity of the other." Bakhtin writes at length on the peculiar identity relation which self-reflection involves. In a mirror, for instance, "we see the reflection of our exterior but not ourselves in terms of our exterior." "Indeed, our position before a mirror is always somewhat spurious, for since we lack any approach to ourselves from outside, we project ourselves into a peculiarly indeterminate possible other, with whose help we then try to find an axiological relation to ourselves.... Whence that distinctive and unnatural expression of our face which we see on it in the mirror, but which we never have in real life" (AA, 33). Mirrored reflection, a variant of "living aesthetically," describes both Jim's and Brierly's orientation to others and to themselves, a commonality Conrad has Marlow focalize at the inquest, "now [that] I had them

Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

91

both under my eyes ... one attitude might not have been truer than the other" (6:57). Brierly leaps offship to his death, unable to distance himself from Jim's own fall from heroic neverland into the prosaic. And somewhere between Jim's natural standpoint of mists and haze and Brierly's seeming granite, the two meet and merge. Each, as Bakhtin puts it, becomes "fictitious[:] is possessed by another's soul." Each in his own way has lingered in the chambers of the sea; each, awakened by human voices, drowns. Stein implies as much: "A man that is born falls into a dream like a man ~rho falls into the sea" (20:163). Mergers of this kind simply replace mirrors with persons. "What would I have to gain if another were to fuse with me?" Bakhtin writes. "He would see and know only what I already see and know, he would only repeat in himself the inescapable closed circle of my own life; let him rather remain outside me:" (AA, 96). Brierly fuses with Jim just as Jim repeatedly fuses with his own "fictitious other"; each, fatally, finds only himself. Marlow says of Brierly, "at bottom poor Brierly must have been thinking of himself" (6:55); he says ofJim, "He was not speaking to me, he was only speaking before me, in a dispute with an invisible personality, an antagonistic an.d inseparable partner of his existenceanother possessor of his soul" (8:75). Like Brierly, Jim also can be said to have committed suicide because of mirror effects. The projective encounter with Brown in Patusan which precipitates his death Jmerely justifies Marlow's earlier assessment: "the youth on the brink, looking with shining eyes upon that glitter of a vast surface which is only a reflection of his own glances full of fire" (11:101). "To purify the expression of the reflected face" (AA, 34) describes Marlow's odyssey thereafter irl this novel. In hope of such purification, and like a more sophisticated but perhaps more impressionable Alice, Marlow passes Jim, readers, and himself through one distorted intersubjective lookinglass after another. Hillis Miller claims that the novel itself dashes such hope, as it Jmust if it is to convey fully the meaning and effect of endless semiosis..9 But, as I have argued, if the novel features "mediation" as its topic, it nevertheless disables inquiry or "interpretation" as modes of approach to Jim. Marlow comes to realize that the significance of Jim's story lies simply in its acts of telling-by and about Jim. The degree to which Jim is made a hero in others' lives (that is, a character to author, shape, and consumnlate, and not merely to make sense of)

92

We Die in a Last Word

measures the governing force of narrative ethics in the novel--over and above relativity of perspective. Thus to choose a second obvious example, the French Captain awards Jim no narrative credence at all: Jim's story, in itself, possesses simply cautionary significance-it is a lesson, an example. "One truth the more ought not to make life impossible ... But the honour-the honour, Monsieur! ... The honour ... that is real, that is! And what life may be worth when ... the honour is gone-ah fa! par exemple-I can offer no opinion. I can offer no opinion, Monsieur, because I know nothing of it" (13:115). Marlow frames the Captain's pronouncement with a discomfort at thematization worthy of Levinas; he even speaks of "disclosure" when setting the scene of their rneeting: "He drew up his heavy eyelids. Drew up, I say-no other expression can describe the steady deliberation of the act-and at last was completely disclosed to me" (13: 115). Of course, it is Jim who becomes completely disclosed (in Levinas' sense) to the Captain, whose able sea- and see-manship place him at the opposite extreme from both Jim and Brierly. The Captain is a lofty, unflappable, one could say almost de Manian reader, and his utterly dispassionate reading of Jim allows for no liveentering at all. Indeed, Marlow finds the Captain's judgments lifeless and inert: "His own country's pronouncement was uttered in passionless and definite phraseology a machine would use if machines could speak" (14:123). While Brierly merely hides behind a granite surface only to succumb to imagination, the Frenchman, his brow "half hidden by the paper," defends "like alabaster" against imagination and the flow of attachments. Whereas the bubble of narcissistic exceptionalism bursts for Brierly, it remains intact for the French Captain, granting him therefore the impunity to go on pricking others'. In a novel packed with imagery of health, sickness, and diagnosis, he represents the ultimate clinician, initially earning Marlow's respect: "And suddenly I began to admire the discrimination of the man. He had made out the point at once; he did get hold of the only thing I cared about. I felt as though I were taking a professional opinion on the case. His imperturbable and mature calmness was that of an expert in possession of the facts, and to whom one's perplexities were mere child's-play" (13:113). But despite his admiration, Marlow's remarks expose the ethical cost of becoming "the mouthpiece for an abstract wisdom" (13:113). The Captain's brand of Gallic hermeneutics knows only transcendence-

Conrad's Lord Jim and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

93

not the immanence of live-entering. Of this fortress of comprehension, Marlow says, "Indeed his torpid demeanor concealed nothing: it had that mysterious, almost miraculous power of producing striking effects by means impossible of detection which is the last word of the highest art" (12:110). One senses not only the coercive quality of such an understanding, its universal applicability to particular circumstances, but also its rejection of the positive sort of authoring-"the gift-giving, resolving, and communicating potential"-which storying demands. The Frenchman's bloodless and abstract ethical code, like all such theoretisms, "far from strenguLening a moral or evaluative position and making it more authoritative, merely discredit[s] and devaluate[s it]" (RB, 153).1° This is one reason perhaps why the novel gives him no other name than "the Frenchman." As with the Patna's oafish German skipper, its Asian owner and Arab lessee, culture or nation in Lord Jim functions as the lowest common sorter tDr identity. And that is only fitting, given that (for colonial powers particularly) substitutions of volkisch for personal identity make for the cITLdest of narrative schemas. To be French, in this respect, means one is irnmediately knowable; to be knowable, in turn, means that one is effectively "solved," one's story is secured. II The status ofJim's Britishness-his "membership"-forms a common burden for Marlow, Brierly,